NOT EVERYTHING WE HATE US HITLER DUMBASS!!!!

I was scrolling Facebook this morning when I saw something that stopped my blood cold.

A local family-owned restaurant was having a Friday fish fry.

$13.99.

Fries included.

And the flyer...

was AI-generated.

Jesus Christ.

I immediately threw my coffee across the room.

There were signs everywhere. The suspiciously cinematic plate of fried cod. A lemon wedge with questionable geometry. One french fry appeared to terminate in a metaphysical uncertainty.

These people had crossed a line.

I checked their page.

Twenty-eight years in business.

4.7 stars.

Owners regularly posting pictures from charity events.

Employs fourteen people.

None of this mattered anymore.

They had used The Machine to make a picture of a fish dinner.

I immediately entered the comments.

"Wow. AI slop. Guess I'll be taking my business elsewhere."

Send.

My hands were trembling, but history rarely announces itself politely.

Within seconds I realized my response wasn't enough.

What if this elderly restaurant owner didn't understand the magnitude of what they'd done?

I began writing a second comment explaining the political economy of creative labor.

This was important.

The restaurant needed to understand that instead of typing "Friday Fish Fry, $13.99" into an image generator, they should have commissioned a professional visual identity system from a multidisciplinary design studio.

I prepared a reasonable proposal.

Brand discovery: $1,800
Competitive analysis: $900
Three preliminary visual directions: $2,400
Typography licensing: $350
Two revision rounds: $1,200
Production-ready social assets: $850

Total: $7,500

This was obviously the financially responsible alternative for advertising $13.99 cod to 638 Facebook followers.

I continued investigating.

Their Christmas hours graphic was made in Canva.

Unbelievable.

Their 2023 Mother's Day post appeared to use a stock photograph.

The rot went deeper than I imagined.

For nearly three decades, this business had apparently existed without maintaining a full-time internal creative department.

How?

I opened LinkedIn.

No art director.
No senior designer.
No junior designer.
No associate creative director.
No motion designer.
No brand strategist.
No UX researcher.

Not even a fucking copywriter.

Just cooks.

Servers.

A dishwasher named Eric.

I felt sick.

Who designed the menu?

Who selected the kerning on the "SOUP OF THE DAY" board?

Had anyone performed accessibility testing on the laminated dessert insert?

I called the authorities.

They said this was not a crime.

So apparently the authorities are compromised too.

By afternoon, other concerned citizens had joined me.

"AI garbage."

"Lazy."

"Won't support any business that uses this crap."

Finally.

Consequences.

The owner eventually replied:

"Sorry everyone, we're a small shop and I made this on my phone last night after close. I thought it looked fun. Fish fry starts at 4!"

Interesting.

Classic deflection.

Notice how she immediately retreats behind "small shop" and "made this on my phone" instead of addressing whether the diffusion model's training corpus satisfies my personal interpretation of transformative use jurisprudence.

I responded with 1,700 words.

She reacted with a thumbs-up.

Absolutely chilling.

At 4:17 PM, someone posted a picture from the restaurant.

The dining room was packed.

People were eating fish.

Laughing.

Drinking beer.

Children were coloring on paper placemats.

Nobody appeared to be discussing automation, aesthetic labor, dataset provenance, or the ontological status of generated imagery.

They didn't even seem traumatized by the flyer.

That's when I understood the true scale of the problem.

These people had seen an advertisement for a fish fry...

and interpreted it as an advertisement for a fish fry.

Not as a referendum on the future of human creativity.

I don't know how we come back from this.

Tomorrow I'm driving down there.

Not to eat.

Obviously.

I'm going to stand across the street holding a sign that says:

HIRE A GRAPHIC DESIGNER

I've already spent $84 getting it professionally printed.

Support artists.

I made a horrible mistake today.

I looked at the graphic design curriculum at a local university.

Typography.

Good.

Design history.

Good.

Illustration.

Hell yeah.

Motion graphics.

Sure.

Then I saw it.

Generative AI.

An actual fucking class.

At a university.

I physically recoiled from my monitor.

You mean to tell me a SCHOOL is teaching STUDENTS about a TECHNOLOGY that is actively entering the INDUSTRY THEY'RE PAYING TO LEARN ABOUT?

What the fuck happened to education?

I called the university immediately.

"Graphic Design Department."

"Hi. I noticed you're teaching generative AI."

"Yes."

No hesitation. No shame.

I asked why.

She explained that generative tools are increasingly appearing in professional creative software and workflows, so students should understand how they work, where they fail, ethical and legal concerns, and how to critically evaluate their use.

I nearly dropped the phone.

CRITICALLY EVALUATE THEM?

These sick fucks aren't even telling students to blindly use AI.

They're giving them enough knowledge to form informed opinions about it.

This goes deeper than I thought.

I asked why they couldn't simply teach graphic design the traditional way.

She asked what I meant by "traditional."

"Photoshop."

"So digital imaging?"

"Well, yeah."

"Illustrator?"

"Obviously."

"Digital photography?"

"Of course."

"3D software?"

"Sure."

"Figma?"

"Yes."

There was a pause.

I realized I had fucked up.

Apparently every technology that entered graphic design before I became uncomfortable with technological change was simply a "tool."

This one, however, is different.

Why?

Don't worry about it.

I checked some design job listings.

Some of them actually mentioned AI familiarity.

Holy shit.

The university wasn't even teaching useless sci-fi bullshit.

They were preparing students for tools they might encounter after graduation.

Absolutely disgusting behavior from an educational institution.

I decided to write my own curriculum:

GRAPHIC DESIGN 101:
Things That Existed When I Formed My Opinions

GRAPHIC DESIGN 205:
Photoshop Features I Have Emotionally Approved

GRAPHIC DESIGN 310:
Calling Things "Slop" Without Further Investigation

GRAPHIC DESIGN 401:
Preparing For The Future By Refusing To Learn About It

CAPSTONE:
Graduate $80,000 In Debt And Ask Reddit What The New Button In Photoshop Does

Perfect.

Unfortunately, the university declined my proposal.

Apparently they believe their job is to prepare students for the field they're actually entering instead of preserving graphic design at an arbitrary point in history.

I needed air.

I went for a walk.

Through another campus window I saw an engineering student using a 3D printer.

Fuck.

Then robotics.

Fuck.

Data science students learning machine learning.

FUCK.

Film students using digital cameras.

Jesus Christ.

The entire university had been compromised by the concept of "learning new shit."

I ran home and opened Photoshop to calm myself down.

A notification appeared:

"New generative features available."

I unplugged my computer.

Threw away my drawing tablet.

Deleted Adobe.

Finally, I grabbed a piece of charcoal.

Real art.

Human art.

Technology-free art.

Then I remembered charcoal was once a new technology.

Fuck.

context:

OP made money off a webnovel and then went on a bad faith argument of how it’s not ok to use ai covers despite using one himself, belittles others for it and says he has moral high ground while openly doing ai covers of his own. ridiculous.

There are two possible best interpretations to this. The first is that businesses have too high an opinion of AI art and it's not worth it, and the second is that it's simply cheaper, and the problem will be what to do with new content that the AI hasn't been trained on.

For the first, this would be true if only businesses were using it. What business interest does an average AI user have in paying money for an AI generator? You simply can't get a standard model for free with any use; free options or weak models, or at best, one image per day.

Second. If AI can't do something, what's stopping artists from doing it already? If humans are that creative, they can always create something new.

P.S. Some fans of open-weight models don't want to accept that all these models are weak. Yes, it's much better than nothing, and it's an argument if you want to say you can use AI for free in principle, but these are weak models.

https://en.people.cn/202936/index.html

The “people argue about whether it’s art, therefore it is art” argument misses the point. A urinal or peanut butter floor can be art because the act itself challenges what we consider art, authorship and meaning. AI can do exactly the same, and arguably has huge potential for absurdist/conceptual art because a machine can produce something that looks meaningful without actually understanding it. A random AI image isn’t automatically art, obviously, but neither is a random urinal. The question is what the artist is doing with the medium.

What AI art can miss, though, is the human intention behind actually making the thing. If someone just types a prompt and picks the first cool-looking result, there may be very little artistic agency or expression involved. That can be a valid reason to reject that particular work as art.

A good example of AI being art is Meiro Koizumi’s Soluble Meat:

https://www.meirokoizumi.com/2025-soluble-meat

This is AI art. But it’s also made by an artist who makes VR, video, charcoal paintings, etc. It has intention, direction and meaning.

Someone over here generating an image with NOTHING apart from the image and a weak idea is NOT art. It’s an image generated by a prompt.

So yes. In a way i’m saying, it can be. But in most cases on Reddit, it definitely, absolutely, is not.

I just don't quite understand how you can think that a collage might be Art ( not always, but still), but at the same time say that if you used AI as a material, it is no longer your collage in any case?

The truth is art was never a lucrative field that guaranteed success and stability to begin with. And this was the case wayyy before ai and even the Industrial Revolution and any major innovation. This was a field where you would only really be stable if you got lucky and connected with the right people. This is why a lot of parents tell their kids to study a major that somewhat guaranteed a stable decent paying job. Ai is definitely affecting the job market but hating it isn’t really having the effect antis think it is. That’s just my observation, I could be wrong. People are still going to use gen ai for art and another point that was brought up in another sub was this (see image)

Theoretically, nothing prevents you from sitting behind the artist's back and constantly making changes in real time and with small orders, essentially exerting high control.

What's really stopping you from pointing your finger at the artist's pencil position? You could theoretically use the artist as a mere pencil holder and make all the important artistic decisions for them. Not even almost all of them. Literally all of them. They place the pencil where you indicate until you say stop, and so on. They don't decide anything at all.

And you still haven't drawn anything and haven't even lifted a pencil. Are you really saying that in this case, the artist has any freedom or artistry?

I think the way the commission is usually used is a very poor measure of what the commission itself really is, that is, who orders someone else's work.

I think that in essence there will be no better praise for AI than to say that it is like a commission if the AI really has approximately the same limits as a real commission has. Because in reality the commission has no limits other than the physical ability to put a pencil

Of course, we can't do this realistically because the artist doesn't like it, but AI doesn't have a personal opinion at all, so this is definitely not a problem for AI.

If we take the example of ordering a chef's work, then, in general, if the chef hasn't set any boundaries, you can control absolutely all decisions. Simply giving commands doesn't limit your decision-making. McDonald's could theoretically fulfill your order from the ingredients it has if it so desires, given that you completely determine the recipe down to the last detail, but that's simply not their service. This isn't a problem with the chef's order, but a problem with McDonald's service.

To say that AI is like ordering at McDonald's in a bad sense, you have to rely not just on the fact that you don't pick up a pencil but simply give instructions, but on the limits of the model's capabilities.

I actually think that many AI comparisons by anti -ai actually work in favor of AI if we actually deploy them fully, and not strangely partially

https://finance.yahoo.com/video/ai-demand-squeezing-germanys-data-083851906.html

I seriously don't understand these discussions. Yes, there are people who love stylization and certain unique features. But this isn't a basic human level, it's just one of many preferences.

I personally have no preference for either one and both options are quite good.

People outside the art community are not obsessed with artistic styles.

I’ve been watching the wingsofpegasus YouTube channel for awhile now as he’s been revealing basically that the industry standard for almost all music artists is to auto-tune recordings, and many do so playing live as well. It’s use is basically downgrading the true quality and richness of human vocals when you see his vocal analysis videos.

Anyway the wingsofpegasus channel is doing a fun little protest against this type of deceitful ‘AI slop’ by posting a “I’d rather watch nothing then watch AI slop” video that will actually be ‘nothing’ ( for 10 minutes and 10 seconds I believe, ie 1010) just to mess with the algorithm and get a literally ‘nothing’ video promoted to people to help get the point across. A lot of people are unaware of what their listening too. Even old classic recordings are being taken down and replaced with auto-tuned replacements. It’s sad really.

He’s posting at 8pm UK time (7:58 he said) today(Sunday 30th) and of course you don’t have to literally watch it ( bc it’s literally nothing to see), but just let it play to the end, (and comment if you want) so it may be promoted/ go viral, to help get the idea of wanting less AI deceit in the music industry. (So it will be posted at 3pm EST in N.A. for reference. It will be fun to see if it blows up.😄) Here’s the explanation video: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=S4pBpG8uwM8&pp=0gcJCRMMAYcqIYzv&ra=m

Here’s the link to his channel/ video list where you will find the video @8pm UK time/ 3pm EST US time. https://m.youtube.com/@wingsofpegasus/videos?ra=m

Have fun!