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this post was submitted on 04 Sep 2025
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Fuck AI
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I have no problem with people selling AI art, it's just.... Tell people that's what you're doing.
Finding cool images and printing them off to sell to people is a thing people do. Print services have been selling the same thing, more or less. They're printing the images and that's worth something.
But don't lie to me about it. Be upfront about what's going on, and let the buyer decide. Also, be aware of your surroundings. Don't go to an art expo and try to sell AI slop. That's just disrespectful. Maybe do it on a street corner or something idk. Set up a kiosk at the mall.
Context matters.
I mean, I wouldn't pay for a print of AI slop, but I imagine there are people who see cool pictures and just want to pick them up... That's not me, but I'm sure that's someone.
and sell at the appropriate TEMU pricing.
Eh. They can try selling at whatever price they want. As long as they disclose its AI art then people should be able to make the evaluation for themselves. I'm not convinced selling at lower prices makes things any better. If anything that might backfire and people expect real artists to compete with the ai low prices.
They can generate thousands of slop in hours. So <$1 is fair.
Whatever the market will bear.... I think is the phrase.
So is " a sucker is born every minute". Bored Ape Yacht Club is valued at $404M.
If someone is willing to pay that....
They don't want to disclose that's AI art because people won't buy it or at least not for the same price as art made by people. AI "artists" mislead for a reason.
I agree, and the picture in the original post is the outcome of that.
If they charge printing fees plus a modest markup, and disclose that it's AI generated, they'd make fewer sales per hour and less money per sale, but they would be able to operate for more hours and likely go home with more money.
The math on this isn't hard, but it requires thinking more long term/economically than I've ever seen from selfish/capitalistic people who would do this kind of thing.
There's also the knee jerk reactions. There's indie games that are being called AI slop.
Theres one game thats $1.50 but getting ripped because the dev admitted to using AI to create the cut scenes. That's all it was.
Perhaps don't call it "art" either since it's just the result of one's and zeros spewing out data.... those people are not "artists" just talentless hacks....
I do so much art printing pages upon pages of /dev/urandom, please buy some. Computer made it artfully in art form.
if a banana taped to a wall is art than processing millions of images, finding correlation between said images and their captions and using the vectors to find those patterns in noise is art too
A banana taped to the wall has more human expression than any AI generated image
No it's a scam for money laundering.
human expression has never been a requirement for art, apes can make art too
This is at the core of why you don't understand anything and everybody is yelling at you and down voting you.
Art is not the same as imaging.
A computer can output imaging. A human artist can output art, which is the human perspective portrayed via imaging.
R. Mutt 1917 flashbacks
Clearly you can't draw or paint and just another tech nerd happy to denigrate human made artwork as no different from the garbage spat out of a machine with little to no thought other than "draw me in Ghibli style"
Perhaps try understanding what art means and stop trying to equate human made art with mass produced content garbage?
Plenty of other artwork to choose yet funny how people always want to bring up the banana taped to a wall as an example as to why art is nonsense you must be an American 🙄
And here a lot of artists would disagree with you. Because for artists, the act of creating is as important as - if not even more important than - the end product. To quote a smart college student's musings I once heard: "Art is how artists process life experiences."
The rest I agree with, AI is a tool and the biggest issues with it are the people who are creating it and the people abusing it and making life for artists worse. Adam Savage once said that someday some film student will do something really amazing with AI (and then Hollywood will steal it and copy it into the ground), but that hasn't happened yet. He said that what he cares about when he looks at a piece is what he can see of the artist in that piece, and with AI, you see nothing.
As an aside, there's a real conversation to be had about how the word "consumer" has replaced all forms of interaction in our vocabulary. We no longer enjoy or appreciate art - we consume it; we're not customers, we're consumers, etc. But that's not really relevant to the conversation except as a comment on how companies have pushed all forms of enjoyment down to the level of eating a fast food burger.
Other dude doesn't understand the difference between imaging and art. Art is the human perspective. This apparently is more than they can comprehend.
Honestly, they're not wrong, it's just that most people don't understand that aspect of why artists are so against AI.
Art is also a conversation and a mirror. Entire artistic movements have been dedicated to creating pieces intended to evoke specific feelings in viewers.
The story of the series of paintings titled Who's Afraid of Red, Yellow and Blue and the attacks on them are a great example of all of the points that I've talked about. As Wikipedia says:
Of the four paintings in the series, two would be attacked with knives, with a second failed attempt on one of them resulting in an attack on another of Newman's paintings instead. All because of some big canvases with the three primary colors painted on them in simple stripes. The first painting to be attacked is literally a red canvas with a single stripe of blue on one end.
My local hardware store has been selling cheap random "art" like this here for as long as I can remember. It's copy-pasted low-quality slop since way before AI existed. I don't see any more or less artistic value in a mass-produced print like that versus an AI generated image.
In that context, I really couldn't care less whether that slop has been made in 5 minutes in paint by some underpaid intern or in 5 minutes using ChatGPT.
But if you go to an art expo with undisclosed AI "art"... well.
I'm with you, btw.
I like this point. Thanks.
I mean Thomas Kinkade built an empire on basically the same bullshit so like, a lot of people will do it. Although at one point he was selling his own brand of slop as an investment.
I mean, you can spend days refining a prompt while looking at a trillion variations of the same possible image. Then trying to upscale it while improving important details instead of losing them. Then checking textures and backgrounds on photoshop to clean up hallucinations.
Or indeed you can just save a cool image from the midjourney feed and print it. There's no real moral dillema yet because most people aren't trying to do art with difusion models.
No moral dilemma, but also no legal issue since AI doesn't get copyright protection.
I have half a mind to print this whole lemmy thread and try to sell it.
It's possible for 'AI art' to not be crap.
One can use sophisticated tools, like depth maps and controlnet, to compose an image/video in all sorts of ways. One can spend hours touching up a generation in photoshop, like, you know, an artist that actually cares about what they're presenting. One can use models that don't feed blood sucking corporations. And like you said, one can disclose the whole process, upfront.
It's just that the vast majority is crap from a few keywords mashed into ChatGPT, with zero deliberate thought in the work and that full 'tech bro quick scam' vibe.
So I guess what I'm saying is this:
Is an unlikely scenario.
"AI artists" seem to be scammers. They will lie about their process. That's who will attend things like this.
Meanwhile, the few hobbyist artists with diffusion in their creative pipeline would never dare show up to a place like this, because of the scammers ruining any hope of a civil reception.
It's also important to remember these models are trained by sampling (imitating aspects of) images they don't have the rights to use directly. I think it's justified being angry about someone using your work -insignificantly mashed together with millions of other people's work- without your permission, even if it's to extend a background by 10 pixels lol
So is basically every human artist. Basically any artist out there has seen tons of other art prior and draws on that observed corpus to influence their own output. If I commissioned you to draw something you didn't know what was, you'd go look up other depictions of that thing to get a basis for what you should be aiming at.
The way AI does it is similar, except that it's looked at way more examples than you but also doesn't have an understanding of what those things actually are beyond the examples themselves. That last bit is why it used to have so many problems with hands, and still often has problems with writing in the background or desk/table legs.
We can actually look at a hand, and understand it, logically thinking about the composition and style to work with. AI can only copy paste the difference of pixels' colors on digital images whose metadata happens to contains the word 'hand'. No matter how many 'examples' have been scraped, it can't actually interpret them the same way we do.
If some alien species asked you to draw part of it's anatomy that can move into a wide array of configurations, but you are required to do so based only on pictures the aliens sent you that they tell you shows that part among other things, would you do better?
Like, what you said is specifically why it's bad at hands and table legs and the like - they can appear in many different ways and it's only reference point for them is pictures of them it's seen. You understand hands and think logically about them mostly because you have a not just wider but deeper set of experiences to work from. Even then, 4 fingered hands have been common in cartoons because even having hands, being surrounded by other beings with hands and in a culture that makes heavy use of hands a lot of artists have trouble doing them quite right.
Yes, I would do better. I would take a look at the pictures, and think about the angles / geometry, the reason of differences between the pictures, and being able to count sure helps. If they were to show me pictures in a vastly different style, I would make assumptions, like it is a different representation of the same concept. I would not just mash them together based on color values.
I get what you're coming from, but the only reason these models seem to be able to get stuff done, is the insane amount of training data and iterations.
Enjoying this discussion, by the way! It's fun to think about.
Not all them. Some are trained on pure public domain data (though admittedly most folks running locally are probably using Flux or Stable Diffusion out of convenience).
And IMO that’s less of an issue if money isn’t changing hands. If the model is free, and the “art” is free, that’s a transformative work and fair use.
It’s like publishing a fanfic based on a copyrighted body. But try to sell the fic (or sell a service to facilitate such a thing), and that’s a whole different duck.
50 Shades of Grey be like...
A surprising number of people don't know that it's essentially Twilight fanfic with the names changed to protect the author from being sued.
Yeah, that's an interesting case.
I guess there was no incentive for Stephenie Meyers and E. L. James (and their movie adaptation money banks, Lionsgate and Universal) to sue. But apparently it was brought up in some kind of lawsuit over an actual pornographic adaptation:
IMO, training software on the corpus of human art without payment or attribution is not good for society and art in general, but, humans who create non-abstract are trained and honestly create in a strikingly similar way. The person hired to make an art piece of Catherine the Great doesn't disclose that he looked at Alexander Roslin's painting of her and is greatly copying the look and feel for the face or the Google search they used to find options for 1700's royal clothing. The big difference in process between AI and an artist with reference art is the removal of the human element, and that's super important.
But instead, we focus on how it was trained, when we train much the same way, or we call it all slop regardless of the actual quality, instead of calling out the real problem, the one problem that we can do something about, it's taking a living away from humans.
Slop machines have more in common with tracing than with learning.
for 1700s* royal clothing