Ask HN: Why do we celebrate AI-Copilots but reject AI–Generated art?

Who is "we", Kimosabe?

Personally, I have no time for gen-AI in pretty much any context, at least given the current landscape.

And plenty of people seem to accept, if not love, gen-AI art. I don't get it, but it's true.

> While browsing YouTube, an AI-generated video appeared and I reflexively told my wife, “That’s AI—skip it.”

My reflex whenever I encounter gen-AI output in any form: text, code, image, music, video, what have you. I find all off it mid in the best of cases, and usually think it's quite terrible. I regularly see posts of the form "you'll never believe this amazing AI generated picture/video/paper/program, and when I check it out I feel like I'm taking crazy pills because I just don't see the magic.

Just my $.02, not inflation adjusted. You (and many others) may well feel differently.

I'm not sure we can be certain everyone has that view. I get the impression many of the people who vilify art generators are also against coding copilots.

> I reflexively told my wife, “That’s AI—skip it.”

> Yet I’m using AI-created illustrations for my graphic novel

Aren't you worried people will skip your graphic novel?

Also, I don't use ChatGPT to rewrite blog posts and don't like people who do. Its style is annoying and if ChatGPT is doing content I might as well ask it whatever you asked it myself directly. For code I do not care much so long as it works.

I vilify code LLMs every time I review a colleague's code, ask them why they wrote something a certain way, and they can't explain. ChatGPT prose is even worse: it's like a corporate press release, only even blander and happytalker.

LLMs are not good enough to replace programmers, authors or journalists (and I suspect never will, since they still rely on accurate and human written sources to produce anything of value)

However, AI art generators in their current form may render all artistic jobs unlivable within 20 years. Learning to draw is one of the most time-intensive skills to master. A master's degree in CS is sufficient to secure a good job, but five years of experience in art makes you a "novice". AI art is just good enough to devalue art as a whole, making it an infeasible profession to pursue, as it's already near the minimum wage on average.

In 20 years, there may not be any new professional digital artists. All art will become AI art. Do we like that world? Cheap, corporate, lazy, with no sign of effort or dedication.

I want LLMS to go away as well, but at the very least, there will always be a market for real text, and always be people able to produce it.

Art generators can be used by people who would otherwise have to pay artists, so they're in competition with the people dissing them.

Code assistants are used by programmers wanting to be more productive. Things that claim to replace programmers entirely get dissed. (But it's more "that won't work" rather than "that's not allowed", because, well, it doesn't work. Yet at least.)

AI-generated content is probably cheap spam, even though it in theory could be made by someone knowledgeable using the AI as a tool.

Things generated by an AI are lower quality than things made by someone competent... but depending on what you're doing, that might not matter.

Because art is the futile attempt by a conscious subjectivity at expressing their subjective experience. It's fraught and impossible and really beautiful. Meanwhile GenAI is not a subjectivity, cannot express anything.

I paint as a hobby. I think a lot of people put less value on digital art in general. It's almost like too perfect doesn't hit it right for most people. I was in a local gallery last week and saw one image from afar thinking "that's very detailed to be so cheap" then get close enough to see it's printed digital art and lose interest. The next painting over was a waterfall and you could see the brush strokes, yet I found it infinitely more interesting.

However, AI image generation is immensely helpful when I want to do a painting. Before I would find photos I liked and stitch them together, or try to imagine things. Now I can get an image much closer to reference.

With code, my feeling is that we have to write way too much of it right now to express what we want. I can write a small bit of text to the LLM and it will fill out 75%+ of the code over multiple files, which I then just need to shape. So much is structure that needs repeating in variations. I don't have an answer but it seems like there's something else missing from our tools and LLMs are providing a bad imitation of what it should be.

For what it's worth I'm all for both. As someone who dabbles in both domains but does neither professionally, there's a very distinctive difference in how AI fits into the process of producing art and producing code.

For code, it augments my ability to produce code. It's very easy to tinker and modify that code if I so choose, and it's much easier to steer it into the right direction (at least when it comes to the output of the code). For art, it just replaces things. If I create an image with AI for example, it's not that simple to drop it into Procreate and start tinkering with it. There are no layers, no brushes, no masks that come with it - it is the output. I'll just re-prompt, or try to find style guides or reference pictures, but there's no place for an artist in the loop. Others might be using these differently of course, but at least my impression is that it's much more of a replacement when it comes to art.

Reproducing copyright-protected information is "trivial" with image (or text) generation, but hard with code generation.

(from listening a lot to artists, so might have some bias). I haven't actually attempted either ... I find the code generation not very useful and the artistic structures interesting, but something's missing.

> Why do we celebrate AI-Copilots but reject AI–Generated art?

That's not the generalization that I would make of HN sentiment.

But one generalization I'll assert is that there seems to be a very strong undercurrent of self-interest, often to the point of cheating. It's not universal, but it might be over 50%. The field has been selecting for, and refining for, people who seek big paychecks, and train for the BS rituals (e.g., FAANG interviews, resume-driven-development, metrics, Agile reactive theatre, growth scam startups).

How are all those people going to think about tools that might give them an edge in their operating mode. Would they be thinking about quality, maintainability, security, team, company goals, or ethics.

Maybe because it's not about the code, it's about the compiled software?

Also, I like AI art; I made a Lego model and then fed it into an image generator to kinda generate a "reverse" reference image. So it looks like the Lego model tries to look like the reference pictures, even though its look is more dictated by the very constraint parts list (it's an alt build of an existing model): https://rebrickable.com/mocs/MOC-218657/RedNifre/31124-battl...

I could not have drawn these artworks myself and the use is so silly that I would not spend any money for paying for them: Without AI, these would not exist.