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Francine Hibiscus's avatar

When this was New Stuff, I saw pals who were Real Artists playing with it and having lots of fun seeing what came out of their prompts. The results were everything from hilarious to terrifying. I still look for extra fingers in any "artwork". I have never used Midjourney, I am intimidated by all digital art, and I am very sad that art is being cheapened by the idea that it can just be produced with the touch of a button, like a microwave burrito.

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Julian Simpson's avatar

Loved this. As always, I agree with me.

Weirdly, I was going to write the exact same piece this morning (minus the angry artist, and the "I've built a HAL-9000 to teach me French" bits). I too am bumping up against the idea that AI scraping a gajillion pictures and novels is not really very different to how I arrived at what we might laughingly call my "style". And I don't need anyone presenting me with an invoice, thank you. Even when the world greets its first AI artist, or novelist, or screenwriter, that entity won't necessarily be better than anyone else, or have a more interesting viewpoint or style.

I'm not sure I agree with you on the learning side of things - since you introduced me to Perplexity, I have gone down some fascinating research rabbit holes in which I have certainly learned things, in much the same way I would have done using Google/Wikipedia (and I don't think that Googling is a skill anyway). It's true that I am not navigating a complex library or historical archive IRL, but I wasn't doing that before.

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