Appreciation post: The guy who proved me wrong about AI art at a coffee shop

I was at a local joint called Brew & Vue last Saturday, talking with this stranger about a viral AI art piece on Reddit. I said it had no soul and was just theft. He stopped me and asked if I knew the artist spent 30 hours curating prompts and fixing outputs. That hit different because he pulled up the workflow on his phone and showed me the layers of effort. Has anyone else changed their mind after someone walked you through the actual process?

2 comments

2 Comments

wright.leo3d ago

Yeah, you know what, I used to be pretty hard against AI art too. I remember telling a friend it was just cheating with extra steps. But then I watched a timelapse of someone fixing hands and lighting in Stable Diffusion, and it honestly blew my mind how much manual tweaking goes into it. It made me realize I was judging the tool instead of the work someone puts into it. Still not my thing personally, but I can respect the effort now.

wade_kelly772d ago

See, I gotta push back on this a little. In my experience, the whole "fixing hands and lighting" thing still boils down to the AI doing the heavy lifting, just with someone tweaking dials after the fact. Even with all that manual work, the core of the image is still based on scraping real artists' work without their say-so, which rubs me the wrong way. Your mileage may vary, but I think calling it "effort" is a stretch when the initial spark came from a machine mashing up other people's labor. Take this with a grain of salt, but I'd rather someone spend ten hours learning to draw a hand than ten hours fixing a glitched one from a prompt.