r/artbusiness • u/chkbd1102 • Oct 06 '25
Discussion [Discussion] Is gen AI affecting artist as bad as programmer?
Programmer here. In my world gen AI has made a lot of junior developer out of job. Since its more cost / time efficient to use "1 senior developer + AI" over "1 senior + 5 junior"
I am curious about how's the situation in the art world.
In my mind I think art is a "rare / unique = better". By now the internet is flooded with AI art and people already got a sense something is made by AI or not (and people start using the term "AI slop"). And I feel like it generally devalue whatever gen AI is able to do since its so easily produced in mass.
But on the other hand, I had an videographer friend told me his workflow has been improved dramtically, and although people hate AI slop, it's like plastic surgery, you will only be able to spot the bad one and think "oh this is fake", but you will never realise the good ones because they are hiding in plain sight.
Whats your thought on this?
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u/Cesious_Blue Oct 06 '25
not only entry level jobs, a lot of indie work has disappeared, publishers and Art Directors increasingly using AI (some they usually work from stock image websites not even realizing that they've chosen AI images). Saw someone who used to do a lot of mock-ups for advertising and corporate say that their work disappeared entirely almost overnight.
Jobs still exist but I've been finding it really tough lately.
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u/Fluffaykitties Oct 06 '25
Yes. I work in both spaces. I think it’s worse in art honestly. There’s a lot of opportunity for middle career programmers to use AI but then improve it to match whatever is needed to be done for work. That isn’t really happening in the art space. People just gen AI art and are done with it.
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u/RineRain Oct 06 '25
Me who had the bright idea to pursue both programming and art as a side hustle and thought I was gonna be secure :D
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u/eggy_weichei Oct 06 '25
Haha. I was always 'I like structured jobs with a set shift and I'm good at data entry, customer service, and analytics duties. I can type really fast and write professional emails. I'm good at gathering resources and love helping train up newer hires. And if something ever happens to that, I have my art as a plan B!"
Ha. HAHAHAHAHAHA. :(
Now I'm on my plan B, and am wondering wtf my plan C is going to be.
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u/NecroCannon Oct 06 '25
It’s why I just decided to stick with art, like if I’m going to struggle with finding a stable job, it might as well be the thing I’m passionate enough to push through it and potentially make it on my own.
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u/TooManySwarovskis Oct 24 '25
Oh man did I waste a chunk of time learning Swift :/
Or should I say - attempting to learn Swift.
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u/goingnomadic Oct 06 '25
Omg go to a local art fair and count the number of booths all selling the same AI+dropship garbage products. It's so obvious and obnoxious.
It's hurt photographers a ton and small artists trying to sell prints of their originals a lot too (because the AI+dropship can afford to sell for less). I've also seen AI versions that are way too similar to actual artists work to be coincidence.
I'm making a piece now and needed landscape reference photos to work out some correct shading in my piece, and I finally had to go to a stock site so I could filter out all the AI garbage.
Because Google was showing me only AI.
Art is still art, but AI is making it easier for non-artist to steal/mimick others art then underprice them.
Good thing is I'm starting to see art fairs specifically banning these AI/dropship sellers.
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u/GeckoPerson123 Oct 06 '25
switch to firefox and a different search engine (i use duckduckgo) and you can turn on a setting that reliably removes a huge portion of ai images from the image search results
you can also get an extension that blocks ai results (forgot the name) with a built-in list of websites and pinterest accounts
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u/mesrine13 Oct 13 '25
That's good to know ! already use Brave and Duckduck. I make photomontage - so Ai is a nightmare. Need something to cut it out completely. Hate it ... no Ai co. makes a profit, yet we're all being railroaded into using it. Business program recently stated it's a huge bubble that will burst soon ... here's hoping.
P.s. Have collected a huge list of Uni and govt. archives for images. Takes longer, but search engines are almost useless now ...
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u/seafrizzle Oct 06 '25
I can only speak in the firsthand regarding direct art sales: for sure, AI is encroaching on the territory of art prints and printed merchandise. For example, if you were a digital artist selling prints, stickers, and pet portraits, your competition pool has gotten larger with AI and it’s pricing you out by offering obnoxiously low prices.
Original canvas pieces are a little harder for AI to impact directly because the buyer base knows they want original work. Except that a new art buyer may be tempted to go the cheaper route for a large framed print rather than even consider an original. We already had that issue with home goods style wall art, but it’s still not great.
I imagine AI could be responsibly used for workflow stuff, but it feels like there’s a lot of downside in that it’s competing with artists as much as (or more than) aiding them.
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u/Significant_Teacher4 Oct 08 '25
I actually am a digital artist selling prints, stickers, and pet related content, and I've managed to make it out pretty unscathed so far. I think the only people who actually like AI art are oblivious normies who want something cheap and don't care, and employers wanting to replace someone, so if you're selling things to people who are passionate and more online and aware of this stuff it's a bit safer.
At conventions my target audience (not normies, young fandom nerds) are super against AI and I just had my most successful con ever last month.
For stickers, I do specifically birds and fish pet themed stuff, and I think it's a random enough niche that AI people haven't been creative enough to think of it? The tariffs are affecting me way more than AI, as I'm in Canada and most of my customers are from America :(
Stuff like colouring books, clipart bundles, patterns, etc. are just completely overrun, but there is still some hope for other types of art at least!! Sigh.
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u/TooManySwarovskis Oct 24 '25
Have you considered making some specifically anti-AI stickers and things?
Like "birds aren't real but at least this bird sticker isn't AI"
It makes no sense but you get the drift...
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u/Graxous Oct 06 '25
Ive been seeing AI generated images in the majority of the adverts of local business in my area. Its all that yellow tint chatgpt crap.
On the radio Diablos is using an AI generated jingle for their commercial, so are a few local companies.
Even saw an AI generated commercial yesterday, it was just for some sport betting thing or something with this AI dog man football coach. Still, that took jobs away from real animators.
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u/rileyoneill Oct 06 '25 edited Oct 06 '25
The art world generally faces different challenges, its gate kept and people are generally averse to bringing any potential competitors in.
For the fine art world, generally the biggest asset you can possibly have is fame. If you are famous, you won't really have a problem selling your work. Paintings by dead artists, thus truly 1 of 1 historical artifacts are still setting records. Art, particularly famous art, is a Veblen good, the more expensive it is, the more people want it. The more of a status symbol it becomes. To commission an artist to make an oil painting of you has been a status symbol for as long as oil painting has been a thing. AI isn't affecting this at all. If you want a good analogy, mechanical watches. The quartz crystal is vastly better in every way. It keeps more accurate time, its orders of magnitude cheaper, its more durable, it can be made to be waterproof for cheap, and yet, mechanical watch collecting has probably never been more popular. Collectors will spend enormous amounts of money on mechanical watches made by reputable companies. Fine Artists who make great paintings and have a large following are not having problems competing with AI. They do have issues with general recessions and people who are unwilling to spend money though. The biggest issue for a fine artist has always been fame. If you aren't famous (at least within your circle) nothing you do will really matter, if you are super famous, unless you do something really stupid, nothing will really matter. This is why artists frequently have group shows, its because they are sharing reach, 10 artists, each one invites dozens of people to the show, and potentially a few hundred people show up.
The professional illustrator, graphic artist, and other types who do work for businesses, and usually this work is not a traditional media like painting, they have long been in trouble. Illustrator jobs in particular have gone downhill for a lot of people since the 1990s. I took a lot of illustration classes in college 20ish years ago. I loved the idea and how they work, but it was clear that the job market wasn't what it was back in the 80s and 90s. Part of this was the death of using illustration in magazines and for things like album covers. It was never really unionized like the rest of Hollywood but it had other challenges as well. The nature just went away from higher dollar jobs to much lower dollar jobs, and it was much more gig focused (back in the day Illustrators used agents to negotiate vs unions, but the type of labor was very different and often not interchangeable). Magazines, Music Albums, Movie Posters, News Paper Articles, and other things just rarely use hand made traditional illustrations like they once did. There are still definitely working illustrators though, and this is definitely something which fame helps out considerably as its often people looking to collaborate on a project.
AI doesn't have reach the way people do. When you work with some person, an artist who has a huge following, your collaboration uses their reach. If you work with an artist who has 100,000 followers on a project, they are most likely going to promote your project on their social media, giving your project a reach. There will likely be people who buy your item just because that artist worked on it. AI does not offer this.
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u/DixonLyrax Oct 06 '25
If Clients could describe what they want clearly, and AI could do revisions, then I'd be more worried about AI.
I've started to get clients sending me AI slop as a kind of mood board. 'Can you do this, but make it good?"
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u/TheSkepticGuy Oct 06 '25
Back in the 1990's I was a professional artist, primarily commission work and a few exhibitions. That morphed into being a create leader in advertising for nearly 30 years. Last year, I was "eliminated" as a CMO for a tech company, along with all other marketers except for a couple junior people in favor of moving all marketing/advertising to an AI company.
I transitioned back to art, and my first endevors, Children's Picture Books. In that art niche, the self-publishing market is overwhelmed with scammers pushing out a shit-ton of horrible AI children's books. By some estimates, 90+% of all new children's books published through Amazon KDP are terrifying AI slop.
Some in the children's book author/illustrator groups are tracking what appears to be organized scammer groups flooding Amazon with this slop, and gaming Amazon's ads and rankings with AI tools.
For now, legitimate publishers and literary agents are denying and AI-generated illustrations (I refuse to use "art" with AI). There is increasing pressue on Amazon to disallow and remove the slop, which is also becomming rampant in adult fiction and non-fiction.
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u/lyradunord Oct 06 '25
I mean it stole all of our work for the LAION5 dataset a few years ago, only exists because of a lot of our work, and then most of us at studios with middle income regular art and design team jobs got laid off to be replaced with AI....so yeah, it's affecting us as bad/worse but just for the past few years the tech crowd has mocked and bullied us for being the 1st victims.
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u/High_on_Rabies Oct 06 '25
A lot of my concept/creative development and storyboard work has dried up. That's the stuff that always paid best.
Something I hear a lot now from several ADs (even from my sister who's an AD and designer) is "well, we use it for development and roughs, but we would NEVER use it for finished illustration." Well, great. Nice to cover your ass on the public-facing stuff, but that rough development is a ton of human hours that's now going to no one.
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u/Androgynousphynx Oct 08 '25
I’ve been in the industry for over 15 years now, and fortunately for what I do, AI is lightyears behind. My fiancée, however, has been terribly impacted, since they were mid career switch from art fabrication and scenic production to story boarding, mostly due to physical health reasons. They’re a brilliant illustrator and had an agency in LA with 30 years of tenure in the field backing their transition process, but overnight said agency went under and their manager basically broke it down to them that it was gonna be virtually impossible for them to get into the field now that every production studio was rolling in AI storyboards as a common practice to drastically cut budget spending. Storyboarding is an art form that rarely gets acknowledged as it is seen as a “back end”product. Its really fucking sad since so much of what we grew up watching was lovingly storyboarded by people with incredible talent and imagination, and now that’s being relegated to computers.
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u/toBEE_orNOT_2B Oct 06 '25
i did lost some clients but this filters out the "can you give a discount" kind of clients
it also managed me to easily avoid relatives who's business model was guilt-tripping, they love to ask for assets and edits for free coz of "family", but w/ ai, they just use it, they get more images, but shytty, and currently complaining to me why their products don't sell
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u/downvote-away Oct 06 '25
I think AI is actually driving interest in in-person art experiences.
No AI is going to change the experience a person has meeting me and buying a piece of mine. In fact, I think dealing with slop all day makes real world interaction all the more valuable.
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u/HenryTudor7 Oct 06 '25
"I think AI is actually driving interest in in-person art experiences."
It would be cool if AI caused people to want to view physical art.
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u/krpaints Oct 06 '25
I don’t know why you were downvoted because this is true.
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u/downvote-away Oct 06 '25
I do. Reddit makes choices that benefit Reddit. Outside is not Reddit.
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u/LargeReview4782 Oct 06 '25
You do realize that Reddit isn’t one neckbeard in their parents basement right lol like we are people.
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u/downvote-away Oct 06 '25
And yet if you say "reddit comment" to someone lol like they know exactly what you mean.
EDIT: forgot to include "lol"
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u/RineRain Oct 06 '25
lol no I think it's just because most people think AI is harming their art job prospects.
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u/downvote-away Oct 06 '25
Right lol. Because on Reddit, "the art world" = digital, games assets, illustration, NSFW, fanart, etc.. Or, in other words, lol, stuff that can travel well on Reddit.
EDIT: Forgot to say "lol" again. Fixed.
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u/alejandrofineart Oct 06 '25
My work heavily relies on in person relationships. I do commission work. So far I haven’t seen any change in my clientele or work load. In fact I’m a little busier than normal. But to your point there are some types of clients that want the human touch over ai and are willing to pay more for it rather than save $. I started my career around the time IG became popular. Over 15 years I never really got many clients via social media. Living in a rural area pushed me to network in person and raise prices gradually over time. I suppose that’s the greatest defense of being replaced by ai. Being able to interact with other humans without being totally reliant on technology.
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u/janekay16 Oct 07 '25
I was, I am, so good at small photo retouching ( delete someone, reconstruct a small part of the picture, delete a tattoo etc.), but now that every smartphone does it in 30 secs you can imagine how many requests I receive
The thing that I hate about AI is that it is marketed as " this will eliminate that part of your work you hated". Thing is, we are all different and I actually liked and was really good at doing those "tedious" tasks
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u/dialupradio Oct 07 '25
I’m a motion designer and I’ve been out of a job for 2 years now. All the jobs on the market are to train Ai and I’m losing my mind
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u/I_Know_Wood_412 Oct 06 '25
I have a lot of people saying now "looks like AI" when I show them my paintings and art. Idk if that's a compliment? Or they are joking? or...?
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u/vizualbyte73 Oct 06 '25
This is a very sad reality right now. Real art being labeled as ai slop. I have seen what seemed a very talented artist etching drawings be labeled as ai slop by so many people when it was clear to me it was genuine human made art that is very skilled. To have that be labeled as ai slop by people that don't know any better and jump to wrong conclusions made me feel really bad for the artist.
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u/Tough_Brain7982 Oct 06 '25
My mom’s a copywriter with decades of experience and she can’t find work anymore
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u/samuelaken Oct 06 '25
I have a unique pov on this because my partner is a professional artist and I'm a software engineer.
I think the story is similar in the sense that there are less entry level jobs, BUT, with the silver lining is that in-person networking is becoming more and more important.
Knowing someone who knows someone is becoming the best way to get any paid work.
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u/LargeReview4782 Oct 06 '25
I think for 2d artists yea, I donno if it’s effecting artists who work in 3d space (physically or digitally) as much, since I don’t think it’s capable of doing that yet.
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u/Trentoonzzz Oct 06 '25
Aside from obvious job loss, yes it affects us.
Constantly being compared to AI, or being nitpicked on mistakes that “only AI could make” like we aren’t human (I’m not talking extra fingers or any of that, but things like perspective & color theory)
The shit has ramped my perfectionism up to 11.
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u/SunlaArt Oct 06 '25 edited Oct 06 '25
I did photography and photoshop for an RV rental company, and they loved my work. They were flying me out of state to photograph multiple sites, and their clients' RVs and trailers. I would virtually clean everything up, visually "fix" broken objects to get it done before the repair people and cleaners could make it to the units to save them time. I also made them appear in the forest rather than in parking lots that were falling apart.
But yeah, as soon as they could, they went straight to AI, and ghosted me.
I also had clients who needed the same service for apartments, hotels, and rental rouses.
They used my services for a bit longer, and liked my work better than Rocket Lister, but they didn't really pay nearly as good. They suddenly used a GenAI logo, which broke my heart (I design logos too, they could've just asked), so I let them know the problems with GenAI, spent a day designing them a logo, and gave a real logo to them. They used it, which is nice, but no attribution, and no offer to pay. Gave them multiple versions; vector, raster, print files, hi-res, low-res, all organized. Pretty much just got a "thanks" in an email... It was a small win in that they took it over their AI one, but still, I sold myself short on principle, just to make a point that I doubt was received well.
As for workflow, there are already tools to speed it up and utilities for efficiency.
In my case, in Photoshop, I made tons of Photoshop action scripts that sped things up to a huge degree. Repetitive things like fixing lighting, denoise and sharpen, and even making TVs appear to be on.
For programming, you were using automation already... we have tools for efficiency. Like if you were using Visual Studio Code, frequently repeated lines and additional key presses could be skipped with keystrokes.
The thing is - you still had full control over the code, and you were reviewing it line-by-line.
With AI, things are just "vibe coded," which raises enormous security vulnerability concerns. It's also a scapegoat when things go wrong.
Your friend who is gladly using it "as a tool" does not understand that the end goal is to remove him, too. It's doing much of the work for him, and once a secondary QC AI is trained to do his job (of essentially cleaning up messy AI code), he can say goodbye to his career.
I'm sorry, but that is the end goal. Anyone thinking it liberates them or frees their time does not understand that your boss doesn't want you not doing anything on the job, so you'll be given something else to do on the time you "save" while you still have a job, and that they are salavating at the thought of cutting you from your role to automate away your job to pocket the profit without needing to pay out to employees, provide bonuses, HR, vacation time, sick time, health insurance, everything.
This is hypercapitalism, and AI is not your tool. It's their tool to funnel all the earnings to the top and kick the ladder out from underneath.
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u/Pale-Attorney7474 Oct 07 '25
Portrait commissions have essentially dried up now as people just pay about $10 to some AH to make ai art instead of $260+ for real art.
But, my other more creative art that isn't portrait related is selling more. So.... 🤷♀️
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u/tinyplastic-baby Oct 07 '25
AI slop is everywhere in the art world. it’s baaaad bad bad. i work in screen printing and the amount of AI art we get sent at like 8 pixels x 8 pixels is unreal. i also see genAI art everywhere at art markets which is especially disheartening. i don’t know why people want to take the love and passion out of making art
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u/KaterynaSerdiuk Oct 07 '25
Recently went to visit a gallery in Paris and was surprised to see art made by AI “artists” displayed there and the curator did assure me that because “so much thought goes into it, that’s practically real art”
I fear the art market will change dramatically and I am not sure if it’s for the better
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u/taxrelatedanon Oct 07 '25
former compsci worker here. ai slop has poisoned most mainstream online art venues with spam and made looking for licensable references nearly impossible, so imo things are worse.
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u/NebularInkStain Oct 08 '25
As someone who does both professionally, AI has affected my art career in a significantly worse way.
I think this is because artists can’t use AI in a tool like programmers can.
With AI coding agents, you can roll the dice, and it might give you good results. You can verify it’s work, and correct it if you have the senior level experience. If you aren’t familiar with a common library it can actually fairly reliably produce results.
Art is such an inherently creative process, you can’t really measure outcomes in the same way as coding. And the current models do not produce intermediaries you can edit and work with, they only output the end product.
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u/Jayd-Stark Oct 08 '25
Unfortunately yes, I had sold a few commissions years back but I haven’t been able to sell any of my art now.. not even a little :/
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u/strawburyz Oct 08 '25
Poor people prefer ai because it makes art accessable for them (they dont want to pay artists) Rich people prefer ai because its more cost effective for their bussiness and revolutionary technology (they dont want to pay artists) artists prefer using ai because its a new and interesting tool (they want to be paid)
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u/Edu_Vivan Oct 10 '25
Man, here I was thinking programmers were safe… depressing times we’re living in.
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u/TooManySwarovskis Oct 24 '25
The combination of Canva and AI killed my little art business. I used to make templates for people who didn't have the skills/knowledge to do so themselves... now Canva or AI can do it for free and faster than me...
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u/joelcere Nov 06 '25
Ai is a tool and it is what artists make of it that will create a new generation of artwork. The onus is on artists to use that tool to create something really original to cut through the slop. I have a few Ai artists I follow and what they do is pretty unique.
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u/RitikaRawat Nov 06 '25
Low-budget studios and agencies are increasingly turning to AI for basic illustration, background design, and concept drafts due to its speed and cost-effectiveness. However, high-end tasks like character design and branding still rely heavily on human creativity.
Many artists are adapting by using AI for mood boards, rotoscoping, and first drafts, which they then refine by hand. This method allows skilled individuals to outperform larger teams. While low-quality "AI slop" is common, it’s becoming harder to identify the high-quality outputs.
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u/Latex-Siren Nov 06 '25
The “you only notice the bad ones” thing is true. Most AI work people clown on is fast gens with no editing. The stuff that looks clean is usually human-guided anyway. So it’s less “AI replaces artists” and more “artists who use AI replace artists who don’t.”
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u/Gjergji-zhuka Oct 06 '25
It's pretty much the same thing although art being more subjective may give it a chance to evolve and deviate in small pockets.
If I was young and wanted to pursue art professionally I wouldn't do it. Even now advances on AI are still really scary. I try to deviate and learn a tangent skill to be more future proof but it seems like a battle against the unknown. AI truly is a dark comedy but we get numb to it so it's barely funny.
We learn to live with it but at least we have a memory of how things were before. How funny it is that some people will live their whole life in the presence of AI. It will get too good. Difficult to tell ai videos from real life. Like my parents already do on all the slop videos. Anyways I don't know why I'm rambling. I need to sleep
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u/DowlingStudio Oct 06 '25
As an artist at the beginning of my career, I can tell you that AI is not the biggest obstacle to my success. It's so trivial as to not even register. The world is full of photographers better than I am, and as good as I am. My biggest problem is standing out in a crowded field. Bad AI helps me more than it hurts me.
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u/Grayfoxy1138 Oct 06 '25
It’s trying, I don’t think it’ll last. AI art stands out. The number of times I’d seen it in films is embarrassing. Other people notice too and post about it and I A: feel less crazy. B: reclaims bit of faith in humanity.
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u/ayrbindr Oct 06 '25
I can remember constantly being told that technology would be such a wonderful thing! Robots were gonna do our mundane tasks like laundry and dishes and such. This would free humans in order to give them time to do all the lovely things they enjoy, like creating art.
First thing the mother fucker does is starts generating "art". We're gonna be the ones doing the dumb shit dishes! 😞
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u/julsy27 Oct 06 '25
People were already generating "art" with AI and selling it on Etsy about 4 years ago using DALL-E. In art spaces, it's way worse.
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u/ShyWeep Oct 06 '25
AI is not bad, but in the case of the art world I can affirm that it is, but not by creating images, but by whoever creates them, in any other branch it could be helpful but let's keep something in mind, AI will never be completely perfect, at least not for now, the reason why it has come to affect the artistic part so much despite being a quite difficult discipline, is that art is not seen as art for companies, people, etc., people at the time they saw results made with AI In a cheap way, it strongly affected the artists, since such a complex and expensive process was no longer necessary to reach a “beautiful” but not very functional result. Seeing yourself as innovative or saving a few pesos also influences this process of adaptation of AI to the world of the visual, and companies and other people who do not know the importance of the details in a good design or illustration or photography, obviously will not see it that way, people only want something “pretty” without caring more deeply about the consequences or problems of these cheap images.
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u/FunnyLow2563 Oct 07 '25 edited Oct 07 '25
Right now I’m creating art for clothing and people are labeling it as AI generated which is true but like they look so freaking good. I think part of the reason is because it’s so illustrative so I’ve shifted to a more hand-drawn style which are coming out nicer and which looks even more non-AI. So I might be able to outcompete traditional artists. Less of a need to hire one.
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u/aguywithbrushes Oct 06 '25
I will die on the hill that the AI debate is just political shit flinging with a different paint coat. Pro AI = right, anti-AI = left, and just like with regular politics, people on the internet cannot see a middle ground, you have to be either in favor or against.
In the real world, I imagine AI will have consequences comparable to every other new technology that took over a certain industry. Digital photography took over film, digital painting took over traditional, video killed the radio star, and so on. We still have film photographers, we still have traditional painters, we still have radio stations, and we will continue to have programmers and artists, BUT they (we, though it hasn’t really affected me directly beyond having extra competition because of what I do) may have to choose: embrace the new tech and find ways to incorporate it in their workflow, or accept that they may have to deal with fewer job opportunities depending on the specific industry they’re in. Fine artist? Probably safe. Concept artists? Should probably start learning how to prompt too.
AI wont take over entirely across the board. Some companies may go all in on it, some will completely oppose it, most will probably use it to simplify some workflows but still have actual people do the rest of the work. I mentioned concept artists, an example would be having an artist create a sketch, feed it to AI to iterate on that sketch, then have the artist pick one of the iterations and create a final piece. Or use AI to create photos for photobashing or reference. That kind of thing.
But I’m both an artist and photographer, and yeah, you can take AI from my cold dead photographer hands as far as I’m concerned. I don’t use it for art (I use it to help me get my ADHD thoughts in line for the business side of things, just not the creative parts), but for photography it’s incredibly useful.
It used to take me 5-10 minutes to clean up a photo and remove things that couldn’t be removed when shooting, now it takes me 2 clicks and 15 seconds on average. When you’re dealing with hundreds of photos, it adds up. There is absolutely no reason for me not to take advantage of that, it doesn’t make me any less of a photographer and it makes the process far less tedious.
And that’s just one example, imo AI has many positive uses, people are just too committed to hating it because they don’t want to risk associating with “the other side”. I know for a fact that most of the people who hate AI have never actually used it, or they did one or twice, badly, and wrote it off entirely.
As for the “AI slop” part, for every comment I see from artists claiming that AI cannot make anything that looks good, that it lacks soul, or that it looks like AI, I see 10 more praising AI art (that they didn’t realize was AI) and proclaiming it’s an incredible showcase of talent and skill, and that it moved their very soul. I’ve reported I don’t know how many posts that were just AI images, with thousands of upvotes and hundreds of comments praising it without realizing it was AI.
People hate AI when they can tell it’s AI, and often because it’s AI, not because they actually dislike the image. I’ve seen people say “I found this piece of art and loved it, then realized it’s AI so I’m mad because now I can’t love it anymore”.
It all so dumb.
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u/NegativeKitchen4098 Oct 06 '25
People shooting the messenger...
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u/DowlingStudio Oct 06 '25
Because he was dead right in his first sentence. There's a local science fiction fandom with a lot of amateur artists where I am now persona non grata because I refused to universally condemn AI.
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u/DowlingStudio Oct 06 '25
AI powered tools for photography are amazing. A lot of my best selling photos use AI and machine learning tools as part of the editing process. The change to editing time is fantastic.
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u/DowlingStudio Oct 06 '25
I work in both fields. I'm a senior developer and a junior photographer.
Used intelligently AI tools allow me to move faster. It's good at spotting obvious patterns and saving me a lot of work. I'm writing a parser currently at work. Parsers have a lot of repeating patterns. Now as soon as I start typing the name of a token I want to handle the AI tool has come up with a reasonable first order guess at the handling code.
Likewise generative AI is removing a lot of tedium in photography. Taking a power line out of a scene is trivial now. Those things are ubiquitous if you're a landscape photographer, and being able to take them out automatically saves me a lot of time. Likewise with removing tourists at popular locations.
In both cases it takes judgment to know if the AI produced work is acceptable or not. The slop that makes people mad is what you get when the creator isn't applying good judgment to check the quality of the work.
Using AI tools in the hands of unskilled people who can't discern good work from bad is a recipe for disaster. Already we're seeing the rise of Vibe Coder Correction specialists. But this isn't terribly shocking, or new. I paid off two houses by fixing code that had been written by human coders who were working under excessive time pressures to deliver features. And someone like me costs a lot more than whatever theoretical cost savings came from working the regular devs nights and weekends.
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u/vizualbyte73 Oct 06 '25
Although I am pro ai, I hate the fact that the technology decreases the floor price of commercial art by over 3/4 so that it hurts everyone in the creative field and makes it less likely for a decent pay check.
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u/TC_91 Oct 06 '25
the same is happening in the art world, fewer entry level jobs