Pyro's Blog - On Luddites and AI Art

This whole anti-AI art panic feels like a cult trying to gatekeep creativity. Newsflash: art schools are expensive as fuck, and largely a racist playground for rich white kids to cosplay as starving artists before they inherit a loft in Brooklyn. Equality doesn't exist in the current art world.

The fact that people are mad that everyone now gets access to creative tools, tools that don’t cost $5k/month and don't require "connections" is hilariously revealing.

How many amazing musicians, painters, or artists of other forms were wasted because they hadn't access to tools and knowledge. Now we have tools that anyone can basically use for free and don't need a high knowledge entry for producing good results.

You think AI is the death of art? Nah. It’s the death of the art factory. The soulless machine where you draw tree bark for $12/hr on a Disney asset team while being told you’re “part of something beautiful.” You're not an artist, you're a cog with a stylus, a slave in hipster clothes. And it blows my mind that people are out here defending that system like it’s some sacred tradition, even tho we had a whole art revolution around modern artists like Pollock and Co, that was all about how Art is not about the process and how hard it is to create, but ONLY about the final piece, the vision, and emotions it evokes.

And yeah, AI models don’t create on their own. They’re not divine beings. They’re tools, like brushes, like Photoshop, like synths. You still need the vision. You still need taste. If you're scared of AI it's probably because your entire value comes from being a technically decent wrist and not from any real ideas in your head. Sorry, but the era of coasting on fundamentals alone is ending. Vision wins now.

All AI models need human input to create. And what most people probably miss is that it also needs human input for the output. The human decides what happens to this output so that it matches the artist’s vision as closely as possible.

And it doesn’t matter how good AI gets, this human vision is what makes it art. Even if you had a magical machine that could literally create what you have in mind 1:1, there would still be artists. The people who can create astonishing things in their mind’s eye will always stand above those who can’t.

Art is finally breaking free from gatekeepers, institutions, studios, tasteless billionaires. Who needs Hollywood when you can generate your own feature-length movie 10 years from now? Who needs Disney? Who needs companies that enslave art, squashing real artists in favor of "she looks good, let's make her the next superstar." No actor is worth 15million dollars a movie and in a perfect world there are no Weinstein's who decide what we have to watch.

You are the one who decides.

If you have something in your mind, you can actually make it. That’s terrifying to people who never had anything in their mind to begin with and their "artistry" consists of just using their wacom pad pretty fast and well.

Let them scream on Twitter