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Hello, your guess is wrong; I was having a discussion about the truth and value of human experience.

The thing you're doing, and you did in this latest reply, is actually a perfect encapsulation of why I am not going to engage with you on the original topic anymore:

Your way of arguing is by quoting fragments of my post and answering each one, but you are also very carefully selecting the fragments, and your arguing is happening through the lens of this selection. The sentences of mine that you quote are specific ones with "hooks" or "handles" for you: definitions (that can be disputed and focused), analogies that are literalized. You do not quote the whole sentences that carry my actual point, and by extension, conveniently you never answer them. Then you feel righteous in your ability to say "Shame you didn't answer X" and then you post your reply as complete - after all, every one of your quotes has your answer to it underneath it. Very unfortunately for me, my argument is in parts you conveniently didn't select to quote.

And now you're demonstrating the second "move" that you pair with it: when you don't answer a point, it gets renamed into a thing which makes it not have to be. My example of the child's drawing and the ten million identical ones never received an answer. My point about the AI communities and the hunger for outside validation also. 

I told you, I'm not going to argue with you about semantics. The truth is that AI art is worthless and I'm confident my original argument and position are pretty rock-solid on their own, without this massive derail. As a whole, my position comes down to one simple principle: the value of a work is conditioned entirely by its making: who made it and at what cost, and whether the materials were taken with consent, and never by how pleasing the output is. AI developers stole, averaged, algorithmized the output of human experience. They made software that pretends to be human - that's called lying. I don't know about you, but I don't like being lied to - it's just like a thing about me; I don't like it.

I'm 100% sure that you can use cold, machine logic, like you have been, to empirically prove that I'm wrong. I'm sure you can come up with machine logic that will point to how we are all being lied to, because our eyes are imperfect, for example. I'm not interested in that way of reasoning; and the reason I wished you good luck is because I used to be interested, and it leads to an incredibly cold, sterile and dead place, and I was lucky that I managed to get out of it.

Hello.

I was getting a bit frustrated reading your reply until you said that ordering pizza on the phone is also a skill, a toenail clipping can be memorabilia, that the monkeys wouldn't write shakespeare in a physical universe and "Ahh, the fairness argument". I now see that we are talking about completely different things, and having two different discussions, and if ordering pizza by phone counts as a skill for these purposes, then our ideas of what skill means are too far apart to bridge in a forum thread. So I'm going to be leaving it there. Thanks for the discussion, and good luck.

Hello.

It is very poetic, thank you! Poetry is art, and my little soul has fought the universe to get here. However, I have no interest in engaging in arguments about semantics! Garbage in the artistic sense is still art, it's just bad art! Pretentious makebelieve is also bad art too. You've missed my point unfortunately; I never said that AI slop looks bad. I also am not about to debate my criteria; this is something I believe - that art as a definition is objective. There is nothing you can say that will change my mind about that! I'm kind of confused though, because reading your post makes me feel like you think you've disagreed with me, but you're making points in support of my argument:

You say taking a photo is its own skill, and that photos can be art - I agree. But notice what you said makes a photograph art: a person trained their eye for years and used their skills in the right moment; the value still comes from the mortal being spending time behind it. You admit this yourself when you dismiss phone selfies - that's literally my argument.

About slop, yes, "slop is not new" - it's made by lazy people, and lazy people don't get to make art. I said this in my first post; you've noticed the exact pattern I described. AI letting lazy people produce slop faster doesn't weaken my argument? More people just get to skip to the end result faster.

Your comment about games is another place you agree with me fully - you tolerate the bland AI graphics and you appreciate the mechanics and the story. In other words: the parts of the game a human being poured themselves into are the parts you value, and the generated parts are the parts you don't. That is my entire argument, in your own words, about your own experience??

As for the crayon drawing, I don't know, man... you calling it "memorabilia" doesn't change anything. You accept that the drawing has value completely independent of technique and you just called it memorabilia (which is art) instead of art... The 10,000,000 generated crayon drawings still belong on no fridge...

"It is possible to create actual art with it." - possible feels like a cheap word to me.. It is possible to hand infinite monkeys infinite typewriters, and one of them will write Shakespeare. A work with AI in it that has human parts and AI parts... well, the human parts don't get to keep their value. A work doesn't function like that. You experience it as one thing - I don't sit down to consider which parts were AI; the very use-of-AI step wrecks that for the whole piece of work at once - once AI was used anywhere, I can no longer know where. The artist can swear they only used it for the textures, but there's no way (and I don't want to - it shouldn't be my problem) for me to verify that.

You know how in sports, when an athlete is caught using steroids, we don't sit down and try to find out which races were clean, right? The athlete's out for good because the whole point of sports is to push mortal human capability, and the one cheating incident makes every result moot.

I am re-reading my post and yours, and I'm realizing I'm continuing to talk about why AI art is value-less, because that's my main point. This is because of this sentence at the core of your arguments: "But the skill involved to create an image with an ai is a completely different skill." The sentence you have written has no meaning; I literally do not understand it. You cannot create an image with an AI... the AI created the image. Sorry, it just makes no sense. "The skill to make a pizza from a restaurant and have it delivered to you is a completely different skill." - this is what it sounds like to me... The restaurant made the pizza... what?

Hello.

1st. Similar to Sirius, I'd suggest you find a community. My personal opinion is that you won't. You'd think that pro-AI people would want to have a community isolated from "luddites", but somehow, they seem to want everyone to be on the same train as them, which is a telltale sign of them knowing, deep down, that their opinion doesn't carry weight. And the second reason - if AI art was worth something, if you genuinely found it beautiful and moving, people wouldn't want everyone to love and accept it. This is admittedly, a bit more difficult to explain, but think of it like this - you're making this beautiful art, instead of trying to get people to look at it and give you validation for it, why is it not enough to just generate more art, or look at other people's generated art? Isn't it, after all, so good?? Now, I know about the different forums where people share AI slop, like civit ai and r/stablediffusion or whatever. I don't understand why they don't just stay there, instead of trying to convince others.

2nd. A lot of people have tried to explain to you why AI art is completely worthless, and you seem to be close to the concept yourself, you're almost grasping it based on your replies. You mentioned that you did a few hours of work and got your stuff on newgrounds nuked, and that hurt you. You mentioned that a lazy person doesn't follow through (I'm not holding that against lazy people!) Instead of explaining to you why AI art is worthless, let me explain to you why art is full of value:

Art is your mortal soul fighting the chaotic universe. You are born and you are going to die, and you have a finite time on this earth. You choose to dedicate a lot of your limited time into honing the skills to make good art. The value of art comes from exactly that. The effort gives it value. Whether it was a few hours you spent, or a few months, the step where you used AI is what muddies the whole effort. That's not what art is at all. People are hostile because they know the value of what you're pretending to have made. A person being lazy, is precisely the whole point. When you are lazy, you don't get to make art. Art is overcoming the laziness, overcoming the struggle and coming out the other side. This is what gives art value, not "a pretty picture". An AI doesn't have to worry about dying. Even a general AI, a sentient one one day, will never have the soul of a human being, because it cannot die - it has infinite time. It can't fall down and break its hand, and now this hand is permanently been broken. It can't lose a loved one. This is a deeper philosophical problem concerning immortality and invincibility. If you cannot die and experience loss, then your soul is just.. empty. Suffering is baked into our universe, and we, sapient life forms, are trying to make our peace with it, every single second in our limited existence. And art is one of those ways we make peace with it. We reach into ourselves, and we scrape off from our time, in order to make art - art which is some kind of a permanent (or at least longer-lasting) mark on a canvass outside of us. That's valuable, because time is valuable - you understand this.

There is an argument to be made about how people complained in the past about new technologies. I find that argument to be insane, because... look at where these new technologies have lead us to. Wars, climate change, cities with no character, people with no personality. People say "the industrial revolution made a lot of people lose their jobs but it brought us tech advancements!!" but.. at the same time, we've never been more disconnected from each other, never more inhuman towards each other. I go into the city and I feel nothing but emptiness...

Anyway, hope this helps you understand why people have such a visceral reaction. It is completely understandable, from my POV, and I'm trying to help others understand it too. Good luck!

ETA: I had another thought about AI art and why people hate it - it's a bit of a disjointed thought though; it's about the value of art again: You've had yourself a child and this child draws you a picture with crayons that says "Daddy" or "Mommy" and it's a picture of you. It's completely technically bad and has no good perspective, composition etc. - you're still in love with the picture. You still hang it up on your fridge and you smile when you see it. You go to your close friend's house and you look at their fridge and there's a drawing of them by their child, and you smile again. You can ask an AI to generate you 10,000,000 "cute crayon drawing by a child for their parent" and you'll get exactly what you asked for. Would you smile? Would you be able to say any of them belong on any fridge? The soul is missing, I hope you can see the point I'm trying to make.