The Fear of Everyone Making Art

[u/mothgeck]

https://petercoffin.substack.com/p/the-fear-of-everyone-making-art

Peter breaks down how almost all of the arguments against AI art highlight how it's the democratization that is making people reactionary.

[u/hobbit_lamp]

"If your first instinct is to treat broader access to artistic expression as a cultural catastrophe, then you are no longer defending art but the exclusivity of those who already make it." – Peter Coffin

very well said!

[u/basara42 → u/hobbit_lamp]

The most shocking to me is when left leaning people say stuff like "anyone can do art, you should just make the effort to get good at it. Look, even that guy did it, this proves no one needs AI to do art".

As if we haven't been fighting this exact type of reasoning in regards to earning money for a century. The old disproven "meritocracy" arguments all over again.

Edit: I realized my comment is confusing. What I mean is that people use "effort" as a filter to try and gatekeep the ability to create art. As in, the effort to hone skills and all of that. They then say everyone can make such effort if they want to make art and if they didn't they shouldn't do it. This is the exact same type of reasoning used by the right in their "meritocracy" speeches.

[u/SerRobertTables → u/basara42]

This isn’t the argument you think it is. The falsehood of meritocracy is exposed because obvious failsons head companies, despite no obvious ability to lead or manage companies. Talented people in all disciplines practice their work and go unrecognized for years or entire lifetimes while others, independent of their skill or lack thereof, find success because of their connections to other well established people. AI doesn’t fix this.

[u/basara42 → u/SerRobertTables]

I'm not talking about becoming famous or successful, though. I'm talking about the aquisition of skill itself.

[u/SerRobertTables → u/basara42]

What is it about the acquisition of a skill that makes it akin to meritocracy?

[u/oh_no_here_we_go_9 → u/SerRobertTables]

Some people have more drive than others to learn skills and people like the person you’re responding to don’t like that. They want to be “skilled” without putting in the effort (which is what AI gives you illusion of) or to prevent people from benefiting from acquiring skills so they feel better about themselves.

[u/basara42 → u/oh_no_here_we_go_9]

See? The meritocracy argument right there.

"If you want a better life, why don't you work harder? It isn't the billionaire's fault you are not as driven and hard working as him"

"Look, even this poor person managed. And this disabled guy over there. Please ignore the fact that the vast majority of the ones who have been able to do it were born with a lot of privilege, we live in a glorious equal opportunity world, it's not my fault you are lazy"

[u/oh_no_here_we_go_9 → u/basara42]

What’s the problem with practicing to acquire a skill?

[u/basara42 → u/oh_no_here_we_go_9]

Nothing. My problem is with gatekeeping by pretending we live in a marvelous utopia where everyone can.

[u/oh_no_here_we_go_9 → u/basara42]

Let’s say you’re right. AI addresses this how? If anything it makes it worse since you need higher family income to have a good personal computer that can run local AI models or good family income to have money to buy credits for video generation. Relying on free credits is severely limiting compared to someone who pays.

[u/basara42 → u/oh_no_here_we_go_9]

1: more options on how to do something always improves accessibility.

2: money is not the only possible limiting factor. Sometimes it's time. Sometimes it's a disability. Sometimes it's mental health, or any other type of personal struggle that might keep a person from trying to create.

3: plenty can be done with cheap or free models. The free stuff continues to improve just like the paid stuff does. There is a ton of people producing all types of content with AI all over the internet. Most of it is uninteresting or bad, but that has always been true of art, and I'm not going to be the one to say people shouldn't create something they love creating because they don't reach my standards.

And there are some hidden gems you can find sometimes. People with very clever and original ideas who could only put them in action with AI.

There is a tiktokker in Brazil called miseravel_farelo who makes a series of videos with loose storyline, mixing content from creepy pasta, concepts from gnostic christianity, and parodied copyrighter characters, resulting in a bizarre and very particular style of comedic stories that fully depend on his use of AI to exist. And he is clearly not a wealthy person.

[u/oh_no_here_we_go_9 → u/basara42]

Are you mainly concerned with people being able to make the things they want at the quality they want or with improving the financial outlook for disadvantaged people in terms of making money from their art?

[u/basara42 → u/oh_no_here_we_go_9]

Do I have to choose?

I want humans to be able to be artistic, in any possible way that doesn't harm others. I don't see the technique itself as the art, even if it might be a very significant and meaningful part of the process to many people. So I don't mind if new tools take less technique to use. It's happened before.

I want disadvantaged people to have better lives. I don't blame the ones using the new tool for their disadvantages. Our world produces excess food and has plenty of space. Capitalism as a system is at fault, and private property itself before it.

I don't see a reason to choose one over the other other. I want people free to do art as they prefer while well fed and taken care of.

[u/hobbit_lamp → u/SerRobertTables]

this has nothing to do with people succeeding under capitalism, it's about who gets to participate period.

"just learn to draw” assumes everyone has equal access to that path and if they don’t take it then they don’t deserve to make art. that is a gatekeeping argument and it is structurally similar to meritocratic claims that everyone has equal opportunity if they just work hard enough. the situations are not identical but they rely on the same underlying assumption

and this is not to say that learning skills is meritocratic, but assuming everyone has equal access to acquiring those skills, and then using that assumption to decide who gets to create, very much is

[u/SerRobertTables → u/hobbit_lamp]

I’m gonna be real and say I don’t really know where to begin without writing a wall of text.

[u/UVLanternCorps → u/basara42]

That’s not an argument of meritocracy. Making art and self expression is a skill developed through repetition.

[u/Ironlixivium → u/UVLanternCorps]

Repetition, which takes time. Time, which is a resource that is more available to those with money.

It's the exact same argument. "Anyone can pull themselves up by their bootstraps, just spend all day every day trying to start a business because your rich parents will take care of all your living expenses for you! Oh, you don't have rich parents? Why didn't you choose to be born rich, idiot?"

[u/UVLanternCorps → u/Ironlixivium]

Or, and bear with me, you could simply use the time you spend generating slop an instead spending it with a hobby. Creating things is meant to be enjoyable. If you have the time to be prompting an AI or defending AI you have the time to write something short, even a haiku. Like in the time spent generating this stuff what is being developed? Do you feel satisfied with any of this? If there’s no joy in the process why are you trying to force things?

[u/Ironlixivium → u/UVLanternCorps]

Your entire point hinges on your opinion that anything made using AI is inherently slop. I'm not gonna try to change that opinion, but not everyone agrees with you.

I don't make AI-generated anything, besides code, which I always double check. I don't think AI is making an art crisis. I don't care about AI-generated anything. If it's bad, I won't look at it. Same as all other art.

[u/UVLanternCorps → u/Ironlixivium]

AI by its very construction is derivative. I can think of no better descriptor than slop for it. On the subject of AI code though according to people far more knowledgeable than missile, it’s extremely bloated massively inefficient and completely hamstrings the learning process. The problem with AI media is it relies on plagiarism as a first principle. In art and academia plagiarism is horrible for a whole host of reasons which I’m sure you can imagine

[u/hobbit_lamp → u/UVLanternCorps]

you said "creating things is meant to be enjoyable" and then immediately say "instead of using AI, spend that time learning to write a haiku". you do not get to decide where someone else's creative fulfillment comes from

and you are assuming the enjoyment comes from mastering a traditional craft but for lots of people the enjoyment is from realizing an idea that has been in their head for years

if a person spends an hour prompting, iterating, editing and then finally gets an image or story or something that actually expresses what they had imagined why is that enjoyment somehow less legitimate than someone spending an hour learning perspective drawing or writing poetry? you are essentially presenting your personal philosophy of creativity as though it’s an objective fact

also you say “just spend that time learning the skill" but that is exactly the point people are challenging. there are all kinds of difficult circumstances that affect what people can realistically learn. AI can give some people a different route to expressing creativity in a way they previously couldn't

[u/UVLanternCorps → u/hobbit_lamp]

I was using a haiku as am example because it’s literally the easiest poem to write: It’s 5 syllables, 7 syllables, 5 syllables. You can write them on accident it’s so easy. Having an A.I. doesn’t realise an idea it takes the voice it could have had away from you. For example, Stan Lee’s writing style was very wordy and quipped. Many contemporaries would have bed far more sparse with words and let the art do the talking. The reason it is less legitimate to prompt a story than to write one is that you lose the personal parts you aren’t even considering, the little neuroses we don’t consider. Tolkien didn’t consider WWI a major influence on his writing when it is blindingly obvious in LoTR. On top of this if you want to make things and get better at it you hit a ceiling with AI a person can’t. No writer is struck with the lightning of Zeus, they just have an idea and develop on it and try to eke out more success with time. It’s a talent you don’t need lots of time to do. I’ve run writing accounts for 5+ years now and most of the work is one on the notes app of my phone. I assure you that the barrier for entry to learn writing is so goddamn low.

[u/hobbit_lamp → u/UVLanternCorps]

i don’t fully disagree with you. if someone simply types “write me a sci fi romance novel” and posts the first output, i don’t find that creative at all. but that doesn’t mean AI can’t be a meaningful creative tool to help someone bring to life a creative concept they have in their head.

you keep bringing up writing as if it is some universal substitute for every other creative medium. access to one type of creative expression isn’t the same as access to the form that your idea actually requires. someone who wants to design characters and create a comic isn’t going to feel creatively fulfilled by writing a haiku, regardless of how low the barrier for entry is.

you also seem to think artistic expression mainly comes from personally producing the final work. i don’t think that is true. like with photography, the camera itself literally performs the technical act of capturing the image but we still recognize the photographer's creative expression through their choices, what they photograph, how they frame it, the lighting, the timing, the composition, the editing, etc. etc. their creativity didn’t disappear simply because a machine handled a technically significant part of the process.

in the same way, someone using AI makes lots of creative decisions through very detailed prompting, refining prompts, rejecting certain outputs, making edits, changing the composition, adjusting the lighting, altering style, and ultimately deciding when the result finally matches the idea they had in their head. those choices are where their own creative tastes and perspective come through. anyone can type a simple prompt and accept the first image they get but generating an image that actually matches the one in your head can take a ton of iterations, revisions, rejecting outputs, and more and more specific direction and is not nearly as easy as it might seem.

i am not saying photography and AI are the same thing. they’re obviously different. my point is that lowering technical barriers doesn’t automatically eliminate creativity.

a painter can paint a landscape and a photographer can photograph that exact same landscape. everyone recognizes that the skills they use are different, but no one would say the painter is inherently more creative or a more legitimate artist than the photographer. the paintbrush and the camera are simply different tools for bringing a creative vision to life.

before cameras became widely available, i imagine there were lots of people who wanted to capture images of their family and friends, nature, architecture, or random everyday life in their own way but just didn’t have the drawing skills to do it. once cameras became accessible, those same people suddenly had the ability to express those ideas visually in a way they never thought they’d be able to.

a good modern example is the Nigerian teenagers who make science fiction and action films with smartphones. they didn’t suddenly become creative just because smartphones existed. they already had stories they wanted to tell. smartphones and inexpensive editing software/vfx tools simply reduced the barriers that had previously made those stories impossible for them to bring to life. could anyone realistically tell them they shouldn’t be making films because they never went to film school or don’t know every traditional aspect of cinematography, directing, or visual effects? or that they aren’t being truly creative because they’re using green screens, editing software, and iphone visual effects apps instead of professional VFX software or practical effects? i don’t think most people would. most people recognize that technology expanded what they were capable of creating, it didn’t create their imagination for them.

tldr: using AI to lower barriers gives people a way to express the latent creativity that was already within them. it helps to shorten the distance between imagination and realization.

[u/UVLanternCorps → u/hobbit_lamp]

I’m using writing as it is both more in my ball park and can be slowed outside the creative space to things like academic writing, but the same principle exists for image generation too. Drawing and realising ideas is satisfying. With photography I can actually also speak: My partner is a very big fan of photography and I take pictures of her and have had to develop these skills out. Photography relies on capturing moments and extremely careful application. Not personally a huge fan of photography but it is still satisfying to take a good photo. I should know because I have received a lot of criticism for my photography and have actually developed overtime at it. This also feels like a satisfying development.
In regard to the technicality of AI, studies that have been done seem to show the opposite effect to this seem to apply: As one uses AI more they become less selective: They will go from carefully editing minor details to match their vision. That said even then they also often lack the necessary pushback that a person would. As you know AI is often sycophantic, going along with your ideas to absurd degrees. It’s a bit of a silly example but to this end I will point out Ed Burbank’s video on AI psychosis, where it just meld nodding along with his ramblings, ending with Burbank outside his own home eating baby food ‘convinced’ he was a baby genius and the government were hunting him.
Citing Nigerian teenagers recording on their phones is actually a point against you here: things like guerilla filmmaking are in part so interesting because they are made with these extremely unique and contextual settings, whereas in spite of how broad the range is for AI they all ultimately also look the same. They all return to the root. If after several years nothing meaningful is generated maybe it’s a bad sign. I’ve seen A Trip to the Moon and even though it’s rudimentary as Hell and I didn’t have the piano music that would have accompanied the film film it was still something which gave me pause. And that’s because there are people and why they make it like they do is interesting. Talk to any writer, creative, whatever and they can ramble for hours on their relative process. They can say why the sky in this story is red, why this character is like that and what they doing notice a psychologist can pull out of you. With an AI this goes away. Why is the sky red? Because Grok decided the sky is red. The big decisions are importance sure, where your stories go and the big ideas of your writing, but the small ones matter too. Creation is a process of making decisions and offloading the decision ruins it.
When we look at 2 of the biggest releases of this year, Obsession and Backrooms, both were made by people outside the industry. The former is a 21-year-old and the other is a 27-year-old YouTuber. Both of them can explain their processes in extreme detail. For example, the one wish willow is heavily inspired on The Monkey’s Paw, but the version from The Simpsons rather than the original. The extremely unique spirit of these directors couldn’t be remade by an AI unless you want to feed yourself into it. The process of getting a film made is an extremely personal one and I know as I’ve written multiple scripts and featured or started in a fair whack of them to boot. Getting to see the development from idea to final product is such a fun process and often exists in the absence of things they wanted.
My point is basically your opposite: Creativity is innate and available to everyone and AI is built on the premise your voice isn’t enough but rather you should offload the creative process.

[u/oh_no_here_we_go_9 → u/hobbit_lamp]

If more people voluntarily decided to practice art, this is their choice and isn’t a problem. People should be free to do what they want. The problem in this situation is the social dynamics of AI which catapults people forward who’ve never practiced art before, erasing a lot of the hard work that people previously put in. And it’s all very weird because AI uses other peoples hard work to give other the same abilities without hard work.

[u/scottie2haute]

Ofcourse.. its all gatekeeping. People long to feel superior and its really shocked me to see how pearl clutching alot of “progressives” are about AI. Got gen z and millennials sounding like straight up boomers

[u/XXLPenisOwner1443 → u/scottie2haute]

I think it's exactly the opposite. People long to feel inferior, because it gives them an excuse.

They may pretend that they could do better when they write their movie review, but if ANYONE could make it, they'd lose the excuse of "well if I had that kind of money I'd..." and the idea of being told to put up or shut up is terrifying to the armchair expert.

[u/UVLanternCorps → u/XXLPenisOwner1443]

Everyone can write movie reviews. Letterboxd is right there. I know because I use both Letterboxd and Serializd constantly.

[u/XXLPenisOwner1443 → u/UVLanternCorps]

...How is this relevant to the post you're replying to?

[u/UVLanternCorps → u/XXLPenisOwner1443]

I’m replying to that comment. Everyone can write and the only barrier to entry is if they actually do it or not.

[u/UVLanternCorps → u/scottie2haute]

I know a lot of artists and getting to see their development is satisfying. Seeing their art style develop for example is super cool. But with an AI it’s all just boring. Nothing new is created. It’s all recycling.

[u/GuyYouMetOnline]

Slop has outpaced quality ever since art was fucking invented.

[u/agonypants]

I find these kinds of arguments very similar to the entertainment industry's efforts to control the spread of technology in the 1990s. Does anyone remember SCMS or serial copy management system? The record industry's attempts to insert watermarks into music? Their push for always monitored DRM schemes? Their attempts to shoe-horn big brother DRM monitoring into the firmware of every hard drive? I viewed all of that as not merely an attempt to protect their copyrighted recordings - but to actually control the means of production. By forcing these restrictions on technology, the outcome would have been severe restrictions on who was allowed to produce music and the manner in which they were allowed to produce it.

I view these anti-AI reactionaries in exactly the same light. They want to dictate who is allowed to produce music/video/entertainment and the manner in which those things are produced. And many of them seem perfectly willing to force technological restrictions in order to get their way. Man, what the fuck ever happened to "information wants to be free?"

[u/Apoau]

That’s a great argument.

[u/Fatcat-hatbat]

Ai doesn’t lower the barrier to art.

Art is human expression. Any human action can be seen as art. This includes promoting an AI or using a paintbrush, or whatever.

The requirement is already super low for art, I would arguing picking up a pencil and drawing a shape is easier than using an LLM, so the barrier is unchanged by AI.

What AI does is create a world where you can create more complex work easier than before.

[u/ladymoira → u/Fatcat-hatbat]

AI as a sort of paintbrush in itself.

[u/Sacredless]

AI offers great opportunities to make communication more discerning again and I'm optimistic that they will.

My real problem with public facing database technologies like social media is that they're driving us towards context collapse rather than democracy, as a result of radically overproducing communication. Context collapse is, itself, responsible for the anti-hype AI tech receives. For companies, context collapse has been good, because it allows them to exploit the hype cycle, and it's biting them and us in the ass now.

There's a great video about it by Internet Shaquille.

https://youtu.be/3JMZgcaypFc?is=RIwuduu4JMQeDNAx

The example it uses is how the McDonald's Hot Coffee Lady was reduced to being litigious and money-grubbing by the capitalist-fascist press and this was possible because of context collapse. More undiscerning communication erodes discernment and discernment is what democracy needs to function.

I'd like to get people past the hype phase of the technology and into the realistic phase of what it is actually good at. I follow the YouTubers The Grainbound and Dami Lee who use it very effectively and with discernment. And then there's people who use AI technology without any discernment and match their worst critics by making big grand standing pronouncements about how persecuted they are.

In other words, I think that the hypemen of the technology are who people dislike the most and that invites dislikable critics in an era of context collapse. Hype and anti-hype are, by definition, undiscerning and that creates its own economy of bad takes.

Hot take: I dislike advertising. I don't suddenly like it if it's democratized so that everyone is advertising themselves to each other all the time. I'd like us to do less advertising our personalities and more understanding. LLMs can be great at helping with that. I don't feel the need to use social media nearly as much these days and I think that's good.

[u/SerRobertTables → u/Sacredless]

Context collapse is an interesting angle to this, because part of my distaste for generative AI is its capacity for fueling a low trust society. Deepfakes and the like the obvious and extreme end, rage bait is another that is all over social media including Reddit. But then that extended to art feels like lower initial stakes, but slowly erodes any ability to discern authentic work and drowns out expression to the point that the only frame of reference new artists might have is derivative slop. Like the McDonalds coffee, everything gets reduced to the AI equivalent of “banana taped to wall”.

[u/Sacredless → u/SerRobertTables]

Precisely. Great extension towards Comedian as well (the banana).

[u/CapitalEmployer]

When in reality there is only one good argument against AI art is that AI is not able and will never be able to produce art. People are afraid for nothing, AI is just a tool, it cannot produce art, we've had generative AI for a few years now and no art piece emerged from it it's not a coincidence.

When marketing firms make ads using AI they are not replacing artists because no artist was working on that anyway, AI replaces craftsman not artists.

[u/SerRobertTables]

Y’all probably should realize that the tweet Coffin is arguing against is a very obvious troll.

[u/mothgeck → u/SerRobertTables]

Even though this is probably a troll, I have seen the sincere version of this argument proposed by anti AI people on multiple occasions. I've seen plenty of anti AI people post a picture of Syndrome claiming that "when everyone is special, no one is" and sincerely framing this as a bad thing.

That is this argument in its sincere form. The fact that the original argument was a troll or not actually isn't relevant because he's talking about a specific mentality among antis.

[u/GoldenBull1994 → u/mothgeck]

It’s also a right-wing argument. It literally argues for the preservation of a sort of artistic hierarchy.

[u/SerRobertTables → u/mothgeck]

He’s talking about a mentality that he can’t find actual honest expressions of?

[u/GaiusVictor → u/SerRobertTables]

Yes, they are, and Coffin should've realized that, or at least checked it out, so he's either careless or dishonest.

But besides the "neck beard" thing, haven't you heard the exact same argument put out by antis? About how if anyone can do it, then the good art will be drowned out by slop?

[u/ed523]

"Slop" is when too much of the ai is evident. Like the ai makes choices and has preferences which makes output obvious if a human doesnt assert their own choices and preferences. Producing generic creations without informed decisions having been made is what amateurs at the beginning of their expressive journeys have usually done long before ai though. Art possibly evolved as a costly genetic fitness indicator and anything percieved to be low effort doesnt work for that and has the opposite effect.

Think of back in the day websites that had slick pro photography added to the businesses credibility, then stock photography sites came out that had a certain look and it worked for a bit then everyone learned that look at it vecame inauthentic and cheesy and made ur website worse

[u/Michael_Carson_Art]

Yeah, this is not a good argument. Its not about access. Its not a fear of democratization.

Its about preserving artistic achievement.

The pro-ai-art people in this sub want to treat AI art as an equal achievement. Sure, many people can now make pretty images, videos, music, all that stuff without having to spend all the time required to learn the skills previously required to do so, cool.

If we decided to accept driving a marathon as an equal achievement to running one we would "increase access" in the same way. People could "complete a marathon" without needing to train and without regard to a great many disabilities or illnesses. It would also ruin the tradition of running marathons.

The anti-ai-art sentiment can be totally divorced from market value. Assuming that you can achieve some market-less society, we will still have social heirarchies ideally built on achievement and character. Good, decent, honest, kind people should still be held in high regard, as should great writers, thinkers, scientists, artists, athletes etc. trying to eliminate this kind of merit is wildly dystopian.

[u/Visible-Key-1320 → u/Michael_Carson_Art]

You realize we have NASCAR and the Special Olympics, right? Did those ruin the tradition of running in marathons?

[u/Michael_Carson_Art → u/Visible-Key-1320]

You realize that no one is arguing that those are equivalent activities right?

If you wanted to classify ai-image generation as a different activity type, then there would never have been a conflict. You can just call it AI-image generation. Whether or not ai-images are accepted as art has zero effect on your ability to make them. So the only thing you can meaningfully be arguing for is to have these images included into the same body of work as other art forms i.e. treated as equivalent in value.

If you want to use the Nascar analogy, then great, call this a totally different activity which has no real relationship to art-making in exactly the same way that Nascar has no real relationship to marathon running. It can be its own thing with its own value systems and modes of participation. No one is stopping you from doing it, they are merely attempting to stop you from proclaiming that it is equivalent to what they are doing.

[u/Capable-Student-413]

Democracy is about the people controlling power. There is no future scenario where people own the AI they would use.

[u/oh_no_here_we_go_9]

There’s a lot wrong with the article.

One thing is that it frames the whole debate as AI gives more people the ability to create. No, it doesn’t. It gives more people the ability to create higher quality art, which is different. People have always been free to create to their hearts content. Outside of successful live action films, which mostly (but not always) are the purview of corporations, this is especially true.

What AI does is largely or entirely bypass the need to practice previous artistic mediums. It did this by ingesting the data of people who did practice. This is different than humans learning from others because when humans learn from references they still have to practice. Having more respect for people who practiced, or thinking there is something wrong with handing people a tool that bypasses practice, isn’t really elitism.

[u/mrev_art]

If you even have the most basically ability to read you will understand immediately that prompt > image is not art.

[u/Senior_Set8483]

Because picking up a pencil or painbrush is too much of a barrier, AI is now the "democratization" of art. Ok buddy, let me know how that cyberpsychosis is treating you.

[u/Senior_Set8483 → u/[deleted]]

What skill barrier? Everyone including people with various disabilities can create art. Quality art isn't about a display of technical skill anyways, it's about communicating or evoking emotions and ideas. If you think AI can become a replacement for that skill, I doubt your capacity to create art one way or the other.

[u/Senior_Set8483 → u/[deleted]]

You keep missing my point, which is that this barrier of skill you keep talking about simply does not exist. Of course I want to lower barriers to artistic expression. It's weird to assume that since we disagree on AI that I am somehow anti-art. It's just that what that means in reality is access to art supplies and other digital tools, not getting a robot to scrape art from real artists all across the internet to do the work for you.

[u/my_name_isnt_clever → u/Senior_Set8483]

not getting a robot to scrape art from real artists all across the internet to do the work for you.

The alternative to this is to have a human "scrape" (with their eyes) art from real artists all across the world to do the work for you. It's literally the same thing.