Like it’s this amazing tool that can literally whip believable looking people from a soup of words but your average goon cave troll focuses on, “elf, boobs, BIG BOOBS, glossy, plastic look, anime, ANIME STYLE, cinematic, marvel, DCU, dead eyes, gaudy colors, vaporwave” and calls it a day.
I was playing around with some face styles and prompting in stuff like people from different ethnicities and countries and it was spitting back some really good portraits. Then I went and looked in the gallery and it was deviantart tier slop. Not to mention people mistaking the chat section for a prompt and putting in literal cp :yea: I feel icky now.
So I make music, you can look through my profile for some links. One of the things you have to grapple with when doing creative works is that when you try and translate an idea that seems good in your head to something tangible, you inevitably run into the “no plan survives contact with the enemy” problem. Some element doesn’t quite work out the way it did in your head, or you find that the element actually works better if you do it a slightly different way but then you have to rearrange a bunch of other elements around that change. And often it just doesn’t work at all, one interesting element can’t be expanded upon to a full work, and you scrap it. It’s an integral part of being creative.
When you have people who haven’t gone through that process, living in a society that discourages people from exploring their creativity after their mid teens, well that’s a recipe for the kind of AI slop we get. They can just throw keywords from their vision into the treat dispenser and yah or nah the end result without going through the process. Without getting into the details, they don’t notice the little things that don’t make sense while they’re in the process of creating, they just look at the superficial of the AI output and miss all the things that are wrong with it.
Friction is good actually. The frictionless engagement with AI is why it one shots so many people who just aren’t willing to accept the difficulty of the creative process.
I’ve been thinking about friction a lot. It’s a really good metaphor for a lot of things. Both good and bad. In creativity it’s definitely good because it drives people to do something slightly different.
I think the problem isn’t the lack of friction, I think the problem as it relates to friction is twofold: One, and this is the most important, is that these systems are designed overwhelmingly to prioritize reducing friction even at the expense of countless other benefits, like finer control. Two, our culture has produced people so averse to friction that the friction of “drafting” is too much for them to find acceptable in their “hobby” of asking the shitty art genie to grant their fetishes.
Reducing friction is good, actually, it just needs to be considered in the context of what the cost of doing so is can the cost can easily outweigh the benefit.
if you think there’s no friction with generative AI you’ve never tried to get it to write code with multiple loops.
This is a great analysis, and something I’ve failed to properly articulate in the past. And something I’ve tried and failed to explain to people about any potential future artists. It gives the illusion of creativity without the actual need to work on your creativity as a skill, it just cuts out all the self-actualising parts of doing art, and while I can’t speak for others, self-actualisation is one of the main reasons I do art at all.
I know using the term “soulless” is the best way to summon the AI bros to “umm acktually” their way into derailing a conversation, but AI is soulless, not just in the sense of it having no deeper meaning, but in the sense of it actively discouraging people who use it from ever thinking about deeper meaning and creativity. I think this might be part of the source of OP’s problem, it encourages the most vapid “creativity” possible, and actively discourages anything genuinely unique or original. I hope my ramble is making sense.