This is so true. I've spent the last 15 years collecting pictures like these and ai has made every one of them obsolete. 
post
I thought the one on the right was AI since it "went viral" recently. But maybe it's older than I thought.
I like to gaslight myself into thinking that all the absurd AI content I see online are just weird photoshop images in disguise
Now I can't even tell what is real anymore.
Me neither. I kid, but I genuinely have trouble telling the difference between AI and heavily edited images. Someone on Reddit posted a video of a model on Insta who I assumed was heavily filters and everyone caught on that's it AI but it took me reading the comments and constantly rewatching to see it.
We are so fucked
same shit
Incorrect.
Extremely weird imagery used to take imagination and talent.
¯\_ (ツ)_/¯
at least you're not saying "gLuEiNg BaNaNaS tO wAlLs Is ArT"
it is if a person does it
not everything that people do is art, you can't have nothing isn't, then everything would be! And there's no room for all that shit, like bees with top hats...
What does the text on that beautiful Strawberry Elephant creature say? Looks like it's in Farsi
It's Arabic. The pic is a pun on "Good morning" which is written sabah el-fol. The picture says sabah el-farawla which roughly translates to "Good Strawberring".
Wouldn’t even call it a pun, as someone pointed out already. I’m going to sacrifice the joke in the name of explaining it.
brief Arabic cultural lesson for those who care
You have your Good Morning (≈Morning of Peace, صباح الخير) in English. In Arabic we have more variations. The standard reply to this first one is Morning of Light (صباح النور). Basically wishing each other a good day by describing what makes it good. There’s a couple but these first two in this order is the standard (and secular *) greeting.
* you’ll see why that is even worth pointing out in a second
Then you have more abstract ones that imply a good day by referring to something (commonly a pleasant smelling flower), like Morning of Roses (صباح الورد) or Morning of (a specific type of) Jasmine (صباح الفل). All of these have a musical quality to them in a way I can’t write out.
You’ll get older relatives sending you standardized photos with these greetings in groups or just to text you to invite you for lunch (or to fix their phone). Here’s the google images result for Good Morning (≈Morning of Peace):

I’ve highlighted the religious stuff in red and the roses with blue, to see how common they are. The religious stuff is mostly variations with Islamic Duas (prayers asking for something - in the case of all of these it’s basically “asking” God to give the recipient good health / a good day / a pleasant path in life - it’s really just a “good luck” phrased in the only way a religious society can express it.
FWIW I’m (mostly) not from a Muslim family so I get secular or Christian versions of these. Often the photos I get are flowers, traditional breakfast food, coffee, a nice breakfast table set in a shaded garden. And often there’s very few pixels. Sometimes an aunt will just take a photo of her coffee and that’s basically a greeting. But it’s usually garbled old jpegs from 2007.
Critical subtext: these are literally forwards from grandma. Well-meaning, but eventually obnoxious, especially back when phones had 8GB of storage.
This meme says Morning of Strawberries (صباح الفراولة) which is both clunky (Arabic’s got a poetic quality and these two words put together just intuitively do not work that way. It has the meter of a punchline if that makes sense) and silly, but with the textured elephant and the 13x12 resolution as you can probably guess it’s just a surreal meme.
But now you know why it’s a surreal meme.
Come back next week for the much less wholesome next episode of Arabic forwards from Arabic grandma: videos alleging the Jews invented homosexuality, cancer, and sex
I think it's just the Arabic for "strawberry elephant"? Hard to tell at that resolution
It says "strawberry morning", lit. "morning of strawberry" (might be misspelled??)
It's a variation on common Arabic morning greetings, "good morning", "morning of roses", "morning of light", etc.
It’s little depressing, cause you post that now and it will get all the same “ai slop” hate.
I think the best that we can hope for is that people will put the same about of work into their AI artwork as they put into this. And the results will be 100x better than what we have without AI.
I was simply talking about work as a metric of time and energy. There is art that potentially can be done in AI that is not simply “typing in a chat box”. Just like photoshop artists aren’t simply “applying filters” or whatever it is they do (you’re right, I’m not an artist).
And for much of the “slop” on the internet, it is just copying some prompt you found and tweaking it a little and posting it on the internet for points.
I think artists have the potential to take AI to the next level and make even better things. Similar to how photoshop artists can make incredible art.
This implies that you know nothing of the work an artist does and therefore negates your opinion.
This is weirdly aggressive as I’m just giving my hopes for the future and not judging anybody… maybe you misunderstood what my comment was about.
make a picture in the style of Rick and Morty of a cat scientist eating a fish sandwich
Did typing that sentence take the same amount of time and energy as doing photoshop or hand drawn art? Cause that’s literally what I said, and you ignored that.
There’s much more you can do than just “typing into a box”. A lot of AI art comes from combining handmade art with ai prompts. Finessing the image with more prompts. Training ai to produce results you’re looking for. Etc.
Have a look at the Ai videos subreddit if you want an example of what I’m talking about. It’s mostly silly shit, but people are combining lots of tools as well as AI to create things that have never been created before.
My hope is that someday AI can be used to elevate art in the same way that photoshop has elevated art. We have images and videos that were not possible before photoshop and other video/photo editing tools. The same creative out of the box thinkers that used those technologies are going so cool shit with AI.
Please don’t act like I am saying that “typing in a box is the same as painting”. Cause that’s not what I said, and for some reason you keep acting like it.
You seem to equate the work an actual artist does to typing in a chat box.
Books are just people typing onto paper.
oh shit, I forgot, no, you gotta write a certificate of authenticity and tell someone else to duct tape a banana to a wall, now THAT'S art! Typing in "banana duct taped to a wall" into an AI tool isn't art, but when you call someone to do it, THAT'S when it turns into art.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Emperor's_New_Clothes
have a read before you defend modern art
I'd like to know the point you think this link is making in this conversation. 🤨
that dumbass shit is not art, and isn't art because some idiot curated it into a museum.
people expressing their feelings or "visions" of a medium using skill within that medium. Taping bananas to walls is not art, since there is zero skill involved.
AI art is art the same way children's drawings are art; they can be an expression of a feeling or a personal "vision", or bullshit made with a desire to gain some kind of resource (social approval, money) at which point it becomes about as artistic as a fast food hamburger.
Art is about thought, not skill.
Skill is required for craft. Can art be well crafted? Hell yeah. Does it have to be? Hell no.
Art is about thought, not skill.
great, so by putting your thoughts into text, then putting them in a computer that you know will realise your thoughts into a visual artifact is making art then.
In a way, sure. What's unfortunate with such a medium is what a small proportion of the thoughts in the final product are the prompter's. The machine references countless works that the prompter has no knowledge of, whereas in a medium controlled by the artist, those references (both conscious and subconscious) add meaning to the piece.
In a way, sure.
🤝
What’s unfortunate with such a medium is what a small proportion of the thoughts in the final product are the prompter’s. The machine references countless works that the prompter has no knowledge of, whereas in a medium controlled by the artist, those references (both conscious and subconscious) add meaning to the piece.
Here's the part where I get mad at people in the thread that say I have no understanding of art (history). There's been several ways of creating art that have been discussed that have the artist leave aspects to chance. It's been done by Cage, people using radios in musical performances, introducing animals into artworks, using the brush like an idiot (Pollock) to achieve these things; in more modern mediums, the entire genre of rougelikes rely on chance to have certain things not be completely fixed, and emergent behaviour is a valuable aspect of creating interactive worlds that contain automatons.
Is there too much uncurated content in a Gen-AI work? Depends how much effort the creator put into the work, and what they are trying to do with it. I'm pretty sure for the actual scenario at the heart of the discussion, shitposts and strawberry textured elephants can have a few "happy accidents" without harming the central message... of the strawberry elephant.
The difference here is that an artist has control over the medium. Every letter was put there with intent, every stroke carries meaning. Deciding not to do these things can also carry weight, and even the decision to let chaos decide is a choice.
GenAI isn't that, it removes the creative process entirely. Sure, you can get creative with prompt engineering, but the resulting art is the prompt not the AI generation.
It doesn't matter how much work you put into micromanaging an artist, a commission is not your art. Similarly, it doesn't matter how intricate and elegant your prompt is, you did not generate the result.
The difference here is that an artist has control over the medium. Every letter was put there with intent, every stroke carries meaning. Deciding not to do these things can also carry weight, and even the decision to let chaos decide is a choice.
no they don't. That's my whole point that there's artworks where the artist doesn't have complete control over the end result, and it's the point.
It’s been done by Cage, people using radios in musical performances, introducing animals into artworks, using the brush like an idiot (Pollock) to achieve these things; in more modern mediums, the entire genre of rougelikes rely on chance to have certain things not be completely fixed, and emergent behaviour is a valuable aspect of creating interactive worlds that contain automatons.
And I would gladly take pollock out of the artistic cannon if I could.
EDIT :
So by your own admission skill is what makes art art.
Absolutely. if that's what it gets to discredit the fucking banana tape guy, hell yeah. Fuck all of those people, the basketball guy too.
END EDIT
Typing “make a picture of a banana taped to a wall” into an text box has skill?
here's the thing that AI haters don't get. You can just do that sure, but you can also put more effort into it, spend time crafting specific Loras and even input visual outlines as starting points. You can also do commonly accepted things to the image after, color correction, edits, shading etc etc. You can write more vivid descriptions to further hone what you are getting the machine to make.
And as I said before : books are just text written on a typewriter/word processor. We haven't disawoved literature as an art form just yet.
but that’s exactly the point of the AI slop machines; an attempt to demonetize a skill and save money for businesses.
Yeah, that's a downside when used in an industrial sense. I would prefer coca cola to pay out the ass for anything they do, instead of paying a modicum. But the topic we're discussing here isn't the next cola ad, it's shitposts. I'm pretty sure that taking time to crudely photoshop a strawberry elephant is just as valid an expression of a shitpost as putting in "Strawberry textured elephant" into a generative ai.
You could probably also do it by searching for a free use elephant model and free to use strawberry texture and combining the two in blender to get the same shitpost.
At the end of the day,it's a fucking shitpost. It doesn't matter. You're just pushing out a concept, not trying to win the prize for best artist.
I feel like you’re arguing to argue at this point and doing a very poor job.
The point is that 1) "Indie" use of generative AI for shitposts doesn't make the creator deserve crucifixion 2) Generative AI is a valid use case for talentless people who want to communicate a visual idea 3) The art world has set themselves up for this fucking argument for too long with the goddamn basketballs in folmadehyde and bananas duct taped to walls, while actually talented artists get ignored. It's the same fucking thing with music. The greatest composers of our time are slaving away at generic jobs to make ends meet, and risking going bankrupt every time they tour. All the attention goes to shitty pop musicians, and slop made by boardrooms and focus testing. The stuff being produced already had no soul.
Sidenote : I still have no fucking idea how Igorrr is making ends meet while creating the best music known to recorded history.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BMAPWtAqpbg
I see. So you truly do not understand art to the point where you can't even make a coherent argument supporting your position on it.
Glad we sorted that out.
https://lemmy.world/post/36502343/19614582
people expressing their feelings or "visions" of a medium using skill within that medium. Taping bananas to walls is not art, since there is zero skill involved.
AI art is art the same way children's drawings are art; they can be an expression of a feeling or a personal "vision", or bullshit made with a desire to gain some kind of resource (social approval, money) at which point it becomes about as artistic as a fast food hamburger.
Citing yourself is not going to change the fact you don't know what you're talking about.
Give infinite monkeys infinite typewriters and infinite time and eventually you’d have avengers endgame script.
I find the "AI slop" commenters as annoying as the "that didn't happen/everyone clapped/albert einstein handed you a $100 bill" ones. Their contribution is shittier than what they are commenting on even when they are correct, but it's not rare to see a comment like that followed by the dumbest logic as to why they think that's the case (especially on reddit).
Great point. I have found myself seeing a meme and laughing and enjoying it, then reading the top comments about “AI slop” and question whether I should have enjoyed it or not. I’m going to try to ignore that part of my brain from now on.
At the risk of getting downvoted I gotta say there is some excellent weird stuff on that same level that was created with the help of AI tools. There are some artists out there with actual talent and creativity using genAI.
It's a damn shame that it's drowned out by the very real and very overwhelming amount of slop. I keep hoping the creeps that flood the internet with that crap get bored of it so it's easier for actually creative stuff to rise to the top.




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