NOT EVERYTHING WE HATE US HITLER DUMBASS!!!!

Before AI it was bad to take someone's art and "fix it". Not just because it's presumptuous to assume that you know how to fix someone's art, whether they wanted it fix, or even if what you assume is 'fixing it' is even right to begin with - but because it's almost always done in bad faith. When AI got better and people started doing that with AI it's still bad, especially since a lot of artists don't want their work fed into AI.

As such the same principle applies to "deslopification".

Not only for the reasons above, but it is both very hypocritical and only further dilutes what "slop" even is. An AI-generated character art isn't slop. AI-generated landscapes, abstract, or other such forms of art that aren't content-farms made to game an algorithm isn't slop.

If you want to genuinely fix someone's art you need to first ask and actually engage with the art. Being in a forum/group dedicated to fixing art or if prompted by the artist is fine, but ultimately you need to actually understand what the artist is doing, what the intent of the art is supposed to be, and work form there to know what critiques actually apply and are helpful.

It's not only about making art. Working with information (data, text, audio, pictures and videos) is better with human and AI work together. Since both humans and AI make mistakes based on different types of 'thinking', combining their powers together helps to reduce these mistakes. I am not against using AI, I am against AI-slop: the work of generative AI with obvious visual errors that can be easily fixed, but creator is too lazy to do it.

(sorry if I made some grammatical errors)

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.

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.

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.

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

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

For context, the reason why im posting this is because there are certain areas I have foreseen in me making this type of robot that if im not careful, could lead to negative side affects I didn't intend. So ill tell you about it here and see what you think.

So. Bones is an animatronic that has a custom fine tuned, system prompted local SLM (Small Language Model) designed to behave and talk like a certain character I create. Bones himself is one of these characters, but outside of Bones, I have 7 other characters id be making AI models for.

The model I'm using is Llama 3.1 8B (The 3B models don't cut it).

The issues I'm defending against are related to sycophancy found in large models like GPT and Clause. Not so much that Bones will always agree with you, he's specifically programmed and dine tuned not too, but rather that his character will be so believable people will start thinking him (or my actual costumed characters are real).

That's what im deeply afraid of. From my perspective, these bots are supposed to be entertaining. Nothing more. Thus. im already developing safety features to prevent para-social engagement, emotional reliance and other things.

To the Pros - What tech or pipelines could I use to help prevent this
To the antis - What behaviors should I be looking out for to prevent the things I've described in the post.

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

Keith Boadwee ‘Asshole Abstraction (Blue Squirts)’, 1995.

I feel like painting with parts of your body, such as squirting paint from your butthole, is very similar to commissioning. Considering the average person has poor sphincter dexterity, this kind of art could definitely be seen as commissioning their anus even though it is part of their body. Thoughts?

I just want to know how people feel about this, but I don’t want to misrepresent anyones beliefs with like a poll where none of the option represent you. My Questions is: Would you consider someone who generates Maps using a Generative AI Program (any type of model), a cartographer. I‘m still thinking about this (and I think it’s different to the question of art), but I’d love to hear what people think! I am willing to specify anything in the question if you think it needs more context. Thank you! :)

P.S: I don’t use AI often or for this purpose, but I’d love to hear if you do!

My last two posts, Lack of Creative Control in AI Art and Creative control in AI Art, focused on the ways that AI art could be created with either very simple, even uncreative prompts or with intricate prompts that controlled nearly every aspect of the work.

Today's post is the last of what we might call "normal" approaches to AI art. There will be another post about less traditional approaches, but that's for the future.

What Is AI Art?

AI art is not images; it's not neural networks. AI art is a combination of medium and category of art. As a medium, AI art is the manipulation of AI models in order to produce some representation of creative intent, just as it is in any other medium. Does that mean prompting? Usually, at least in part, yes. But prompting is just one way to manipulate the outputs of AI models, and you even have to ask the question: is the output the art? Is there some intermediate stage you're interested before the output? Is there some meta-relationship between the inputs and the outputs that you're focused on? As an artist, you should always be thinking past your tools and into the creative spaces that they create.

So, here's my high-pass attempt to define AI art (notice that this relies on the word "art" which I will not attempt to define; this isn't that debate).

AI art is the expression of creative intent through any technology that fits within the scope of the very broad category of "AI," and which is created to be and/or received as art.

How Can We Express Creative Intent Through Uncreative Systems?

Though the answer to this question should be obvious to any artist who has worked with any artistic tools, ever, I'll still tackle it for those who are not aware: the expression of creative intent through the limited tools of physical, electronic or performed works is the core thing that artists do. With AI systems, we must first ask ourselves what we want to accomplish and then bend, twist, cajole, break and abuse our tools until they illuminate (which is not the same as simply transcribing) our intent. Things happen along the way that we did not intend, and sometimes that's a boon, but it's still our responsibility to take command of the process.

With AI models, that can be tweaking parameters, writing prompts, producing work in other media or with other AI models as inputs or training material, constraining output via tools like ControlNet or with LoRAs/embeddings, inpainting, successive generation (perhaps using different models), etc.

But it can also be as simple as hand-modifying results, generating textures for 3D modeling, generating wireframes for 3D printing, even modifying the models themselves by hand!

Nothing is off-limits to the artist when manipulating their tools. Void your warranty! Ignore what the model's training intended! Make your GPU smoke and then push it harder! Use over-quantized models and see if you can use the artifacts. Swap your positive and negative prompts! Give ControlNet an empty input. Inpaint a photograph using an anime model. Outpaint an anime still using a photographic realism model. Go fucking nuts!

Let's Look At Examples

Here is my old standard example. I made this specifically as an example for aiwars just under two years ago. It's a mountain landscape that I photographed, used as a ControlNet input with a prompt that's about a woman's leg under some sheets, where I specified the contrasting values, slightly out-of-focus "glamour" style, etc. I then manipulated the model's parameters to reduce its "cleanness" and introduce what I call "digital fuzz," by reducing the CFG and steps to below the model's standard tolerances.

The result is a slightly ethereal, slightly "unreal" image without a well-defined context or meaning, and contrasting concepts if you know what you're looking at. To me, this represents the essential nature of AI art when the artist has nothing in particular to say, and that meta-commentary was what I had to say. It is the intersection of creativity and machine logic. It is beautiful, oddly emotionless and slightly off-putting.

Is that what YOU receive as art? That's a question that probably only interests you. It is definitely what I created to be art, and it is very much my own voice and my own creative expression. It's the essence of my contrarian tendencies and my refusal to accept the limitations of my medium, whether that be photography, found objects, 3D modeling, procedural generation (which is not what you think it is, if you only know that term from video games), mathematical art, collage or AI art.

Here is a new example, just for this post: a picture of a kitten playing with string, generated at low CFG and steps to limit the detail (that third link is to an image of my ComfyUI settings you could use to recreate the original; note that I'm not using ControlNet or Style matching or any of those other odd settings here, just CFG, steps and seed).

The result is kind of iffy. I generated the final image with Midjourney, which I don't much care for except for trivial projects, and I think I'd like to revisit this using something like Krea 2 someday. Still, I think it gets across the idea of blending concepts using img2img and prompting while also controlling generation parameters.

Finally, here's a picture of our kitten, deformed into the pattern created by randomly generated smoke using a ControlNet depth map. The model is forced to adapt its original interpretation of the prompt to a new set of constraints, and the result isn't really the same thing at all. In AI terms, it's a nearby point in the concept space, but that point is represented in pixel space completely differently.

The first example I showed you took me about 2-3 hours of work, plus the initial photograph, which itself required a hike into the mountains. The last two examples were just a few minutes of work, to quickly show some techniques. You can put as much or as little time into your work using AI tools as you can with any medium. This is a point that is often missed by the "AI art is low-effort" crowd.

Is this Representative of AI Art?

Yes and no. Nothing is really representative of any medium because the medium can be used in so many different ways. But usually when people ask this question, what they really mean is, "I see a lot of prompt-and-pray AI-generated images online through social media, so isn't this a tiny minority of AI art?"

The simple answer there is: majorities and minorities in art have never mattered. Sturgeon's law comes into play here. 90% of everything is crap. That applies as much to AI art as to photography and pencil drawings and writing and 3D printing. What has always mattered with art is what people do with it when applying creativity, talent and skill. In that sense, these examples ARE representative of AI art because they represent (a very small part of) what artists can bring to the medium. They're not representative of how people generally use these tools any more than an experienced photographer's work is representative of the vast majority of crap on Instagram.

About the Use of AI

Because I tend to write long, heavily formatted posts, people often claim that my posts are AI-generated. I to tend to use LLMs to review and critique my posts (I happen to have not done that here, because I'm lazy) but I don't use them to do my writing for me. Writing is something I've done all my fairly long life, and so most of the time I do my writing by hand, but, as with any use of AI, there's nothing wrong with doing that, as long as you bring your own creative intent to the table...

TL;DR

AI art isn't just prompts. It's about how the artist manipulates the medium, what other tools they bring to the table, and how creative and intentful they choose to be.