A Cartoonist's Review of AI Art, by Matthew Inman

I do think it's, like really long, but he makes some good points.

The actual title is A cartoonist's review of AI art.

So tired of pointing that there is something in between "marketeer story tellers" and "real artists".

Bots in the Hall, Neural Viz, GossipGoblin, even Joel Havers animations. All made with genAI and all undeniably creative works, that could not have been created, at least not in that time frame, by a single person without it.

I love Matt's work and often agree with him, but the "no heart" take is just too harsh.

I don’t think that toil makes good art, but choices do. Artists make choices and those choices add up to something unique and tasteful. The choices are influenced by constraints and the desire to communicate something. There is a “why”, not just a “what”.

I find that AI art misses both of those, and that makes it feel soulless. No decisions were made by a thinking, feeling human. There is no “why”.

>nobody seems to want it

I've had a lot of genuine fun playing with AI art generators dating all the way back to deepdream. I love the tech, I want it as it was, as it is, and as it will become. This tech have in the last few years given me much more joy than any artist have come close to. It shares creative powers freely, a far cry from the overly commercial streaks dominating much else.

What I don't want is to see yet another has-been meme artist rehash the same anti-AI tirade that we've seen so frequently that any given LLM could re-create it verbatim due to overfitting.

All talk about "Human originality, soul, heart, the divine spark" and yet all they display is hysteria.

Lost me with the initial observation... it seems that merely being "AI art" is paramount to any feeling the art could evoke. To the author, just knowing that the art is AI generated is "gross". I feel like this bias is all too common; especially in "artist" circles.

I'm reading some literature(fictions and non-fictions) reviews these days, and realized that literature itself, is just recording our lives in thousands or even millions of different views. The events in the real life can be similar or even identical, but will finally result in many different books, some of them are bad while others are masterpieces. Then I suddenly realized that why I hate some AI work as a long time content consumer, because that the creator behind them are just utilizing AI as a "tool", to quickly generate something meanlingless only for sensory stimulation, which stays at the surface-level, becoming a sort of cheap sensationalism works.

In contrast, I must admit that there are some AI assisted creations really shine , for example, generate an AR annotated POI image with nano banana(https://x.com/bilawalsidhu/status/1960529167742853378). But sadly, there are only 1% of creations, regardless it's an image, an audio or a video, are good, inspiring and exciting as previous ones.

Before AI can get a consciousness, it's a tool, no matter how "smart" it looks like. Only the human who use the tool smartly will create outstanding works.

This is mostly commentary on the state of Matthew's knowledge of AI tooling. You can use preprocessors, train your own text encoders, build pipelines to automate tasks that you might not want to dwell on so you can focus on art.

AI is just another tool. Not everyone who uses a computer is an artist, but you'd be hard pressed to find an artist that doesn't use a computer who doesn't make it a point not to.

When I think of the golden age of motion graphics (pfft), I'm not thinking about fleets of pale interns toiling in Adobe After Effects to produce choppy renders at the wrong resolutions because they're still clinging to their college MacBooks.

I'm thinking about the analog system that After Effects was created as a digital, computerized abstraction of— Scanimate. And I think about the confluence of tech that enabled that and the people who seized upon a problem and solved it. It's entirely possible to do what these tools do completely manually and traditionally, but where are the high moral purists expressing disappointment in the spiritual weaklings who rely on computers to create art? When did doing become diminutive?

I love that AI can break the individualization of struggle that some artists believe in, because what's really important is growth and evaluation. Matthew was successful, and now he's insulated and grumpy. He leaned into a strength that became his brand, and I think with how little he's left his comfort zone, this Ayn Rand phase was inevitable. He's not going to give it up and start over to prove he's a "real artist", but he'll tell people doing art in other ways (most of whom will not become successful or profitable but who still have done) that they're not legitimate for exploring differently.

Art is still hard. You can't cram for art school. You have to be able to prove yourself, continuously, to your clients, your audience, your family, and yourself. Art is a pursuit in virtuosity of the fundamentals, even if other people don't like what or how you do it. And if Matthew stands by his message, then the people struggling under the disapproval of people like him who may not help you or want to see you succeed, and don't give up are doing exactly what forges an artist's spirit.

AI art mostly doesn't make use of the medium. There are things you can do with computer vision and user interaction that just aren't possible with traditional media.

I remember the game PlaneShift, which has an interesting not-for-profit development model, and which uses natural language processing to handle text. The possibilities here are really impressive! You could fully voice player characters, parse user intent with better accuracy, etc.

There's all sorts of stuff you could do. Introspecting the models themselves gave us DeepDream. Setting early models up to talk to each other caused headlines about AI inventing its own language. Leaning into the unhinged nature of the medium interests me, as does displaying "thought" graphically.

Even back in the ML days, I had high hopes for this sort of thing. Discarding those hopes because of AI slop feels like throwing the baby out with the bathwater. The whole problem is that people use an amazing (but glitchy and imperfect) technology and use it to make bad art in existing fields, instead of pioneering good art in new fields. It's herd mentality from both sides.