Pulling a Slot Machine Handle Doesn’t Make You an “AI Artist”

When you tell an artist what to create, you give them art or creative direction. But that doesn’t make you an artist.

It gets even worse when you are using an AI that barely gets you. It only understands words. It doesn’t understand what it means to be human. It hallucinates and can barely draw things that you learn in your first art class.

First I have an MA in Multimedia. I’ve been doing multimedia art for 27 years. I’m an expert at Photoshop and I shot more than a million pictures. Many were crap. Some were incredible.

But I’m deeply offended by hacks who call themselves AI artists. Especially when they basically didn’t do anything except a Google Image search with a slot machine.

Last year, I dove into Midjourney pretty deep. As you know it creates four amazing images and gives you the choice of which one you like.

It literally has a dice icon in the Discord interface, because that’s what’s happening. It’s just rolling dice, connecting dots on random noise.

Some people would call this “art direction” or “creative direction.” I don’t know.

It was like giving art direction to a child savant. Sure some of it was amazing, and sort of what I was thinking. But usually, it was something I wasn’t even thinking of.

But I couldn’t make minor adjustments with regular consistency.

It couldn’t draw a dodecahedron or common geometry.

I asked it to make a pentacle. It couldn’t. Even DallE couldn’t.

The fact is AI isn’t an artist. It’s a fartist. It’s a hack guessing the right answer, and failing.

The Biggest Danger — Thinking Beauty is Art

But if it's pretty, isn’t it art?

Not really.

If a human didn’t sweat over it, have actual skill used to create it, have real world experience to base their creation on, didn’t use imagination, didn’t pour emotion and meaning into it, then its not art.

It’s just another pretty picture.

This takes me back to my Photoshop filter days.

When filters came out, the world went crazy over how amazing they were, and how they could make it look like you had sketched or painted a picture.

But they were a fad. A trend. Today artists laugh at people who use filters, because those people often don’t understand how to use filters so well that you don’t notice they were used.

They’re a cheap trick. A hack. A novelty. They won’t endure and move people to tears in a thousand years.

Likewise, I’ve seen incredible art generated by Midjourney, because somebody put in 100 characters of text.

Just because you can write short descriptive text doesn’t make you an artist.

What do you do about it?

Go actually take the time to learn how to draw.

Do multimedia artwork.

Learn composition and color theory.

Try to draw hands or figures.

Put thousands of hours into your craft, pushing boundaries that nobody has ever passed before. Travel into the undiscovered territory, or the rarely seen places.

Do something never done before.

Be creative. Go out and create something new.

Earn the title of being an artist.

Until then, you are just a poser pretending to have skillz you don't actually have.

You are just a boss taking credit for work that you didn’t do.

You can do it, and even get away with it, but ultimately you’ll know the truth. And it will leave you hollow.

And when you do that, ask yourself “Is there something better? What is this strange euphoria and cathartic release I get from putting real sweat and effort into making art?

What is this expression of my soul that only I could make, that no AI can do?

What transforms my pain and rage and anger and sadness into something my fellow human can relate to? And then you’ll know what it means to make art.