The explosion in popularity of AI imagery isn't because the results became more artistic, but because they made it easier for people to mimic technical execution without understanding or caring about making art.

Put differently, it made it possible for them to have the technical execution without being able to understand or change why certain things are appealing to them. That's why most of it looks the same and why the vast majority of the results don't have any appeal beyond satisfying the ego of the person who generated it.

In a way, the appeal of 'modern' AI generated imagery to its users is similar to someone who thinks chess is cool, doesn't care enough to understand it, but wants to play anyway, so they use a mediocre chess engine to generate their moves against other players and rely on playing a massive number of games to make their win count look good.

> The explosion in popularity of AI imagery isn't because the results became more artistic, but because they made it easier for people to mimic technical execution without understanding or caring about making art.

It's almost like when people first started buying really fancy DSLRs with no other training, and took a lot of magazine-quality amateur photos.

SD raises the bar a little though-- it trained on a large body of professional images, so generating anything non-fantastic is probably going to be framed and composed half-decently.

...which is the problem. It's all too perfect. Wabi-sabi is dead; everybody can impersonate a professional artist/photographer now, so everything they're producing is the equivalent of photorealistic, award-winning, 8k motel art [...by Greg Rutkowski].

I disagree on the "all too perfect" part. It's pretty much exactly like when people first started buying fancy DSLRs and so they took a lot of photos that were technically great but weren't interesting content wise.

The images generated by SD etc are technically great, but the content is all 'same-y' with no individuality, to the point that people used to seeing images of that kind of art can very easily recognize when they're looking at AI generated images, even if they don't have any of the telltale technical errors (like poorly defined fingers).

The difference is just that getting a fancy DSLR was still on the path to potentially developing photography skills, while using image generators isn't. So while those interested enough in photography might've eventually developed their skills further, those using image generators just become abusive and disrespectful towards actual artists for not 'acknowledging' them as artists.

It's perfect until you want something specific, then it's a pain in the ass. Even with LoRA models and ControlNet and everything else, the lack of any essential control is always going to be limiting.

To play devil's advocate though, there's nothing wrong with creating something just to satisfy your own tastes. The problem comes with trying to pass yourself off as a professional artist using these tools.

Yeah, I agree with that, nothing wrong with people generating images for their own satisfaction and even sharing them as long as they're clearly tagged as AI generated. Just like how computer assisted chess is allowed to be its own competitive thing called 'Advanced Chess'.

However, just yesterday I came across someone trying really hard to play at being a pro artist, trying to show recordings of their drawing and painting process when they were obviously using AI (by roughly tracing over the AI image, masking the AI image underneath, then recording themselves erasing the mask, revealing the AI image underneath).

In certain artistic sub-fields I'm interested in, like with anime art, I've seen a lot of vitriol thrown around by AI 'artists' because they haven't been through the learning process through which they could empathize with actual artists and the basic courtesies that exist in the community. This has been largely responsible for my negative opinion on the social value of recent developments in AI generated content.

To give some examples, there was an incident where an artist had been streaming themselves drawing something, only for someone to take the incomplete image from the stream, have an AI 'finish' it and post it as their own before the stream even finished. Then there was a more serious incident where someone finetuned a model on a specific popular artist's work and started to sell generated images under the original artist's name. This one ended with the site hosting the content having to change their rules to ban monetization of AI art.

> Art involves technical execution

I think it's a stretch to call Midjourney output art and technical execution. I think it's more "content" and "regurgitation". And most, not all, of what trends on the subreddit is pop culture mashups. It grew because people love Star Wars and Disney and Game of Thrones and so on and so forth.

> Less appealing and useful

Further instrumentalization of art to produce a median state of being appealing is IMO not a laudable goal. Everything Adorno predicted about the general course of the culture industry in Capitalist economies was more or less correct and AI art is just accelerating these trends.

Map this same logic to how we use language in creative works: would it ever be desirable to reduce all of language’s diversity and variability to a similar state? How is that distinguishable from the kind of Orwellian horrors that Americans love to decry?