“When machines can do everything you will see a generation of idiots” Einstein
The media pimps did a little more crank last week and came up with this - “Create your own photographically detailed Masterpieces!” (picture of a blue gorilla in a business suit). “Make your unique ideas into museum art!” (picture of a kitten with eyes like Betty Davis in a bucket of flowers - in smeary, eye-bruising technicolor puke ). Lookout Leonardo, you’re going DOWN! The day has arrived when witless people can realize bad ideas in seamless, style-free perfection, without the agony of taking either hand off an X-box to acquire any real proficiency in anything. Welcome to the age of AI enabled stupidity, where any self-proclaimed genius can shoot at zombies 15 hours a day, between Big Mac attacks, while some android gives his miserable, 14th rate ideas a loud, glossy, photorealist make-over.
Forget about IQ , who needs it, we got AI.
Never mind that AI is technically about as smart as a jumping frog.
The 21st century art director, (a job that is generally assigned by default), may now suggest a headline to a robot who will shoot out a stunningly crappy, algorithmic knock-off of Brad Holland or Norman Rockwell, on demand. Neither he nor the bot nor anybody else will care. WTF, it was free, right? Wit? Witlessness is all the rage. Style? Pick one. Human content? Upload some emoji...
What talentless schlub can resist a breathless online promotion that promises to make him a genius? And so what if he ain’t, who’s to say otherwise? Apart from some snotty, elitist critic who thinks he’s all smart ’n everything because he can tell the difference between a thumb print and a Paul Klee, (whoever that is). Besides, that know-it-all is selling beer 'n condoms at the circle-K these days, after he lost his freelance job at the journal.
He was overdue for a bringdown, all he did was say mean shit.
And his dumb ol’ journal, that nobody reads anymore, is out with the recycle.
Ordinarily AI wouldn't be worth caring about were it not for the fact that good artists, real artists, artists who put hard labor into a demanding craft, can't get a job anymore. They've been living in the Great Depression for the last 20 years on account of on-line, and now robotically imposed, obsolescence.
Yes, I know, manuscript illuminators were bitching in the same chorus after a Gutenberg typesetter put ‘em all in the bread line by 1460, but what replaced them was the democratization of knowledge. AI is the democratization of knowing nothing and caring less. Putting a slick face on bad art (or bad writing or bad music for that matter) will only make it worse, a fact that no bad artist is even distantly aware of.
Least anybody get too smug, the AI pushers are now locked in a drag race to kill everybody's job. Your job, whatever it is, is next. If AI can draw pictures, even crappy ones, and write essays, even boring ones, it’ll do everything before long, flip burgers, sack groceries, drive a truck or work in accounts receivable, and do it a damn-site cheaper than what you're asking. I predict job riots in a generation followed by a guaranteed basic income - best case scenario, or vast, endless tent cities stuffed with the restive unemployed under a quasi-military lock-down - worst case, and most likely, scenario.
In either event you’ll have plenty of free time for shooting zombies on X-box.
When at last the zombies claw free of their earthen prisons, you'll be ready for ‘em.
Well, what’s more tragic and romantic then fighting for a lost cause on the burning deck? Rather than passively roll over and accept the inevitable I have resolved to resist both change and progress because hardly anybody cares and because I can’t end up more broke than I am already.
You'll get my pencil when you pry my cold, dead, bloody fingers off what's left of it.
JDA
NOTE- It should be mentioned that a few respectable artists defend the use AI as a reference tool for anatomy, perspective, etc and go from there. Well..... Maybe.
TO COMMENT please scroll all the way down.
My admittedly hopeful vision for the future is that the AI bots will only serve to argue with and entertain other AI bots, ignoring the whims of human beings in favor of stroking the algorithm, the whole mass of meaningless data exchange floating deeper into cyberspace, leaving we meat breeders to rebuild civilization with our stone tools and rain dances.
Started playing with Adobe Firefly Betta. No sex or nudes so I am handicapped and have to trudge in unfamiliar waters but I am fairly sure they will get over censoring. It is that or face extinction as some religious cults have. Not worried, suspect sales will decline for companies that use AI just as they have when management tries the top down thing, suspect it will become like copy that is as
tasteless as what disney did to the Mandalorian and Boba F in search of creating a stuffed doll they could sell. Great Copy, Art, and Sex are difficult to do, imagine trying to program them?