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I Am An AI Hater

(anthonymoser.github.io)
443 points BallsInIt | 2 comments | 27 Aug 25 19:10 UTC | HN request time: 0s | source
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jkingsman ◴[27 Aug 25 19:49 UTC] No.45044262[source]▶
I appreciate seeing this point of view represented. It's not one I personally hold, but it is one a LOT of my friends hold, and I think it's important that it be given a voice, even if -- perhaps especially if -- a lot of people disagree with it.

One of my friends sent me a delightful bastardization of the famous IBM quote:

A COMPUTER CAN NEVER FEEL SPITEFUL OR [PASSIONATE†]. THEREFORE A COMPUTER MUST NEVER CREATE ART.

Hate is an emotional word, and I suspect many people (myself included) may leap to take logical issue with an emotional position. But emotions are real, and human, and people absolutely have them about AI, and I think that's important to talk about and respect that fact.

† replaced with a slightly less salacious word than the original in consideration for politeness.

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randcraw ◴[27 Aug 25 19:57 UTC] No.45044367[source]▶
Picasso's Guernica was born of hate, his hate of war, of dehumanization for petty political ends. No computer will ever empathize with the senseless inhumanity of war to produce such a work. It must forever parrot.
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perching_aix ◴[27 Aug 25 20:20 UTC] No.45044662[source]▶
To honor the "spirit" of OP's post:

I looked up Picasso's Guernica now out of curiosity. I don't understand what's so great about this artwork. Or why it would represent any of the things you mention. It just looks like deranged pencilwork. It also comes across as aggressively pretentious.

What makes that any better than some highly derivative AI generated rubbish I connect to about the same amount?

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jacquesm ◴[27 Aug 25 20:25 UTC] No.45044721[source]▶
That a human made it to express their feelings.
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perching_aix ◴[27 Aug 25 20:27 UTC] No.45044744[source]▶
What do I care? Can't even tell what feelings are supposedly being expressed there.
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jacquesm ◴[27 Aug 25 20:31 UTC] No.45044802[source]▶
That goes for all art. It either stirs you or it doesn't. I find https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9tjstsWoQiw to be one of the most beautiful pieces ever recorded, others can't listen to it and think it is bland and a terrible recording.

You can't argue about taste.

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perching_aix ◴[27 Aug 25 20:32 UTC] No.45044818[source]▶
But then why wouldn't AI generated art be able to stir me? Why is a human being in the loop so important as to be supposedly essential?
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petralithic ◴[27 Aug 25 20:37 UTC] No.45044891[source]▶
It's not. If one takes the fact that art is in the eye of the beholder [0], then yes, even AI art may stir you, especially as a human is the one generating at the end of the day, for a specific purpose and statement about what they want to convey.

There is a good part of the series Remembrance of Earth's Past (of which The Three Body Problem is the first book) where the aliens are creating art and it shocks people to learn that the art they're so moved by was actually created by non-humans. This is exactly what this situation with AI feels like, and not even to the same extent because again AI is not autonomously making images, it's still a human at the end of the day picking what to prompt.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Death_of_the_Author

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jacquesm ◴[27 Aug 25 21:44 UTC] No.45045693[source]▶
> it's still a human at the end of the day picking what to prompt

I think that 'dutch people skating on a lake' or 'girl with a pearl earring' or 'dutch religious couple in front of their barn' without having an AI trained on various works will produce just noise. And if those particular works (you know the ones, right?) were not part of the input then the AI would never produce anything looking like the original, no matter how specific you made the prompt. It takes human input to animate it, and even then what it produces to me does not look original whereas any five year old is able to produce entirely original works of art, none of which can be reduced to a prompt.

Prompts are instructions, they are settings on a mixer, they are not the music produced by the artists at the microphones.

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petralithic ◴[27 Aug 25 22:00 UTC] No.45045868[source]▶
Have you actually used image generators today? It can produce things it's never seen if only you describe the constituent pieces. Prompts are a compressed version of the image one wants to create, and these days you don't even need "prompts" per se, you can say, make a woman looking towards the viewer, now add a pearl earing, now adjust this and that etc.
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1. jacquesm ◴[27 Aug 25 22:15 UTC] No.45046016[source]▶
> Have you actually used image generators today?

Why would you ask this? It sounds like a lead-up to some kind of put down.

> It can produce things it's never seen if only you describe the constituent pieces.

It can produce things it's never seen based on lots of things that it has seen.

> Prompts are a compressed version of the image one wants to create

They emphatically are not. They are instructions to a tool on what relative importance to assign to all of the templates that it was trained on. But it doesn't understand the output image any more than it understood any of the input images. There is no context available to it in the purest sense of the word. It has no emotion to express because it doesn't have emotions in the first place.

> and these days you don't even need "prompts" per se, you can say, make a woman looking towards the viewer, now add a pearl earing, now adjust this and that etc.

That's just a different path to building up the same prompt. It doesn't suddenly cause the AI to use red for a dress because it thinks it is a nice counterpoint to a flower in a different part of the image because it does not think at all.

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2. petralithic ◴[28 Aug 25 14:26 UTC] No.45052581[source]▶
I think you're reading too much into my comment. It's not a put down, I'm genuinely asking because it seems many people still think anyone serious about AI just types prompts into Midjourney, but it's become a lot more complex than that, akin to electronic music production; producers haven't played every single note with a physical instrument their synths synthesize yet their arrangement of the notes is what makes them a producer, and so too with AI workflows such as those seen in ComfyUI. If one is not familiar then they might not understand where the field is today.

Regarding prompts, I never said a computer "understands" or is "emotional" about an image, I don't think anyone actually thinks that, on either side of the debate so not sure why you're bringing that up. By "compressed" I just meant in the information theory way, in that if you have a specific series of words, and a given temperature and other settings for a given model, it will deterministically produce the same image, hence the set of those attributes can be thought of as a compressed representation of that image. I made no claims about it thinking whatsoever.

> It can produce things it's never seen based on lots of things that it has seen.

Yes, just like humans, as I had said in my initial comment about the same old arguments being said since 2021 when Stable Diffusion came out. But again that's tiresome so let's not repeat that here too.