I'm not an artist. I'm just not. It's not something I have put a substantial enough amount of time into that I can realistically do anything. I am crafty, sure, but I'm really specifically talking about visual art: drawing, painting, sculpting, etc.
No less, I have lots of artsy ideas. I have lots of things that I would like to see made, if I only had the skillset to make them. But between learning...
I'm just out of time. Not in a, "ah, well I got too old" kind of way. In a "I literally do not have enough time in my days to entertain yet another hobby" kind of way. If you look through my website, you can see how much goofy stuff I get into. Sharing stuff I find and find out for free is something I really adore. Still, it's not the half of it.
So given everything you can see, plus all of the stuff you can't, you can probably imagine how much time is left for... literally even one additional thing. Zero! Zilch. All of my time is used up. If I could mine an extra 2-3 hours out of the day without completely annihilating myself, I would. But I can't.
But I still have ideas. They're not limited to visual art, but this is where ChatGPT really comes in wildly handy, because it allows me to create art that I never could.
And, this is why despite that, I sympathize with real artists whom ChatGPT is giving a hard time. It comes down to this: I know exactly how much time I had to put into my hobbies to get to a place where I was even OK at them. Not passable, not amateur-ish. To even rise to the level of "novice" at anything takes a ton of time, work, soul, and energy. It's a hard price that has to be paid.
To see this machine that's capable of erasing that gap entirely and producing stuff that's "kind of alright" or "good enough for my purposes" has to be frustrating. I understand that. I've felt it with a lot of the things that I've learned, that I've worked on. I get it. It feels invalidating, and you know that no matter how good the machine is, the end result will still have no soul to it. From one person who does hard stuff to another, I empathize with you.
But in kind, what I hope that a visual artist understands is that without this technology, none of the visual arts stuff I've been dreaming about could realistically be brought to life. As I mentioned previously, I am quite literally out of time on stuff that I can realistically work on. There's no more time in the day. It's not that I do not want to put in the time to learn visual arts, it's that there is no time that I am able to spend. The bank is empty. All of my hours are pretty well accounted for.
The ideas I have aren't frivolous ( in my opinion, anyway ). I want to generate stuff that relates to the other stuff that I like. Have a look:
Now I'm sure you can see many flaws all at once. I know they aren't perfect. I know that from a real, true, visual arts standpoint, they might not even be good. There are weird artefacts and wrong details. There are fuzzy parts and things that don't make sense. Even worse: I doubt I'll ever be able to fix them.
But please understand -- these aren't just frivolous things I'm generating. To me, this stuff is important, because there's so little art that represents the kinds of things I think about so much. You can find it in anthropological texts and piecemeal on FaceBook from true fans, but beyond that, there's not a lot to see.
I empathize with you. I really do. I know what it's like to watch people choose machine-generated, half-assed trash over well-produced, hand-worked outputs. I am a programmer. I've seen the outputs of "vibe coding" with AI and they aren't good.
And I also know that learning to code is out of reach for a lot of people. It takes a ton of time and, frankly, is hard. I beat my face against the boulder of programming through long days and late nights, and only after a ton of effort did I get good at it.
Even so, there's a certain magic to watching people make their "app dreams" come true -- or at least get far enough that they can ask a programmer for help. As much as AI generated code disturbs me due to its ... quality ...
It levels the playing field a bit -- enough that people who would never in their wildest dreams think they could create an app or a website can at least get started now. And that's equity in a new and unique way.
I'm not that excited about AI. I don't like wading through the junk. It has been exhausting sifting through other peoples' AI generated code, asking them why they did it that way, and then they have no idea. I've watched systems break, things just straight up not work, and 1 week projects take a month.
But even I have to admit that I'm getting something out of it. And other people are, too. What you get out of it depends on who you are and what you want... and damn am I happy to see those cute, comic, Serbian faces.
There isn't a good ending to this. It's been a collection of thoughts I've been chewing on for a while, and I don't think I'm ready to swallow. But after a few sessions with ChatGPT generating images... I don't know. I wanted to get these thoughts out there.
Artists, visual and otherwise -- programmers, copywriters, everyone -- the things you do have value despite AI's existence. That is a true statement. It is also true that AI gives people a seat at tables they'd never dream of otherwise, and that's a very special thing.
I wonder what will happen.