While I’ve never had a problem with LLM’s in most actually productive and reasonable use cases I’ve still never really seen the point in generative AI images and of course am constantly annoyed at all the slop online.

But in testing some locally run models as well as frontier models I’ve realized that there’s not only actual utility but also lots of interesting potential creative and artistic applications of these tools that are not slop.

Prompting is not remotely comparable to actually putting in the effort to bring something to life from scratch, but I do seriously think that the process of doing many small adjustments in your instructions over and over again until you get something that resembles your vision takes mental effort, taste, and creativity. It is not a substitute for art, but I don’t think that makes it bad, I think it should be understood as its own thing separate from art but still a creative outlet, maybe comparative to programming in some way.

And of course I am obviously not talking about just whipping out ChatGPT and just using whatever you get, that is completely different from the method of AI “art” generation I’m referring to. If you’re not actually envisioning the specifics of a scene then that is just slop, because the model is doing the “creative” work for you instead of you doing it yourself.

Another use case I can see value in is using it for editing and visualizing things. My friend has a daughter with aphantasia, so since she could not mentally picture things she was indecisive about how to decorate, so my friend took a photo of the space and asked for the decorations to be shown in that space and her daughter ended up liking the idea. Thats one of I’m sure thousands of potentially millions of cases where these tools can actually be used for accessibility.

But visualization really is my main point here, it’s the main thing I see as being worth while in these tools, because it allows you to quickly get a reference for what something would look like that’s not just your own brains neural networks confabulations, and as these tools continue to get better they will be more and more appropriate in professional workflows.

So I just really don’t see a reason to outright reject an entire technology, yes the slop is exhausting, no its not good for the environment if you use cloud/frontier models, no you shouldn’t act like you’re a real artist because you just prompted some stuff, but there’s still so many current and potential use cases that are objectively useful to many people, so instead of complaining about how others use these tools I attempt to find ways I might be able to use these tools for myself and in a way that’s aligned with my morals and ethics, of which are very similar to the anti-AI crowed. So I am not pro or anti ai, I am not blindly rejecting or blindly accepting of it, it is a tool, and so like any other tool it should be used responsibly and where appropriate. And particularly in regards to AI it should be kept to yourself.

I am still very much against polluting the internet with slop, people don’t really care about what you prompted, I think it’s fine and reasonable to use it as a tool in your creative process. But it should not be your final product, ever.

And of course the environmental impact is a whole other can of worms, but you shouldn’t act like real artists are like eco friendly saints, paper requires trees, digital artist draw on a device made with minerals acquired through child slave labor in the Congo, and I’m sure you can think of many more examples.

And it is a bit of a clickbaity title, but it’s true, I do understand AI “art” now, it’s just very specific use cases not as a whole.

And no LLM’s were involved in writing this, I never “write” with AI on public posts. That’s weird.

And for further context I’m a photographer and occasional graphic designer, neither of which involve generative AI at any step of my creative process.

And I’m sorry to the person who just posted about how AI debates are exhausting, lmfao. I’m trying to bring a more nuanced take to this debate and I hope that is reciprocated; I’m not interested in arguing about this stuff I’m just sharing my perspective.

I would make the “in this essay I will” joke again but I basically did write an essay, on the toilet too, truly the throne of introspective pondering. And as the writing environment implies this really is not a genuine essay or an attempt to convince anyone of anything, it’s just my yapping so I do not want nor expect it to be treated otherwise.

Ffs I literally now just dropped my phone on the tile floor💔😭😭 Mustve been the ghost of Marx trying to take it away from me while writing this BS since as we all know communism is when no iPhone