We3 but it’s extra stupid and incel

While i like the idea of sex cults; I don’t like the idea of being in a sex cult full of racist techbros that hold the religious belief that AM will go terminator on us.

Spam? You mean all music made with AI?

Burn it all down!

It never goes below his 30% of cultists it seems.

Or to throw into a woodchipper? Pretty please?

The thing Is I have seen my work being realized: through doing it. Through doing the hard work. I am not a musician but i love music, and I’ve done a couple of songs that i like by recording simple things and mixing them together. I don’t have music in my head. I experimented, did the work. Made a mess.

I think the problem is that there is people out there that has never experienced the satisfaction of creating and want a palm in their back for not even trying! Thinking that they have fully realized ideas in their head is a great cop out for this.

I’ve met a lot of people who are very proficient in Putting down visual Ideas and most of them have a very humble approach to what they do. They speak about “experimenting”, “doing research” and “putting down options for review.” The Dunning Kruger effect comes to mind where The less someone knows about a discipline they are tackling the more you overinflate your level of skill. On the flip side; The more experienced you are at a discipline, the more you understand your limitations and become humble. In this sense It’s not aimless judging to make a guess that people using LLm’s thinking the have “fully formed ideas in their mind” are overestimating their abilities. LLM’s have a bad rep of exacerbating the dunning Kruger effect by cutting them off with engaging with the medium they are “commissioning” The LLM.

I have never seen a commissioner believe they created the image they commissioned, but for some reason LLM users want some recognition for being “Ideas men” We have always had Ideas men. Everyone has a dumb Idea in their head. Some of them are stuff that don’t need to engage with any cultural language or medium. But is there any merit to them? I’ve had clients that do care for the results given: A writer asks for a set of sketches for the architecture of their fantasy story; They ask questions, they beg for feedback, they even bring crude MS paint drawings. If a visual concept results from this collaboration, The writer won’t take credit for the visual part. They will be humble and recognize that they don’t have the background to generate a fully fleshed visual idea idea. But the work done during the collaboration, The back and forth enrich both parts of the process; An artist can learn a lot from a writer and vice versa. The is struggle, critique. It’s messy; There is work done.

This will sound like an unrelated topic; But I’m a huge music fan; I have a collection of hundreds of albums. And what disgusts me about AI music in particular is not the fact that “there is no talent” or “soul” but that it’s designed to kill the vibrancy of the music community. Everyone can take someone else’s sound, and tack a dumb masturbatory “idea” on top. There is no engagement with theory, music history, or with music scenes. There is no engagement with people. It’s spam. It’s Useless spam made by “idea men.” And there is an air of staleness to it. I said it on the initial post; There is a stench of cowardice to AI “creative” tools. The AI music scene statistically is full of white men making music that mimics Black women singers. It’s larping, It’s being unable to own up to your body and it’s limitations. Who wants to waste time listening to that? I feel “ideas men” Have a tradition of being like that. People that don’t want to put themselves in their ideas and instead outsource the work. At the very least conceptual artists of the 80’s and 90’s like Demian Hirst thought of a brand or a style. But Ideas men of the LLM go beyond that. It’s the signature style of the vending machine or some lora of work they stole.

It is easier than ever to make something and putting it out there, and it’s pathetic to see people make excuses on why they won’t do it. I know people in wheel chairs paralyzed that draw with their frigging mouths! There are no excuses.

Not exactly; People who can draw can use that tool to explore visual ideas and think visually; But you can do that with design concepts, paper cutouts, Adobe Illustrator shapes and so on. People who only engage with linguistic concepts as in the case of an LLM are not really engaging in the nuances of any visual language. They are using information set into a translator that outputs a result. It’s like thinking that Using google translate Makes me “Think in Chinese” lol.

I see it often that clients come to me thinking that they have a realized visual Idea but they really don’t have much. They have some overall aesthetic short hands. A couple of images they liked and a standard they want to meet. This is not visual thinking; this is called being a client. Then there is the job of art directors, they won’t draw everything themselves but they will offer a system, information critique, cultural awareness, even technical methods.

You can engage an LLM as a client or an art director; But in the end you are still using google translate to write in English and have an output in Chinese, if you follow my former metaphor. You are not really thinking in the true language of the output, There is wide cultural barrier between you and what you are making; most of the context cues and nuances of your message are lost or irrelevant.

The thing is; Our “Imagination” lies. Our brains are especially good at forming concepts that are often snippets of visual echoes and linguistic narratives but don’t form into anything concrete. In order to form a concrete visual idea you need to engage with visual concepts themselves. A character designer needs to have a grasp on human anatomy but there is design specific information like contrast and color balance, form, shape, line economy, design sense; then there is cultural information like emotional response to shape and color, particular fashion sense, cultural and environmental cues. All those are choices; a designer engages with them, interiorizes them, experiments and chooses what works best for them. Every Specific Area has different context and it’s own sense of rules.

A Good character designer might think they would have good “visual ideas” for graphic design but in reality this won’t be true until they engage with the particular context that is proper of graphic design. Since by using AI people are cutting themselves off to working with any visual concepts: (It’s all linguistic descriptions) They are cutting themselves off from making decisions that are truly visual. They are clients. Just like the clients that hire an artist that more often than not, don’t know what they want. But “think” they have an idea that is concrete in their heads. People that instead of immersing themselves in visual or cultural concepts take short hands. Reminds me of this thing of calling visual trends “punks” putting “cyberpunk”, “cloud punk” or “hope punk” in their prompts. Oversimplification. Visual stupidity.

As for aphantasia; Supposedly I have it. Back in college it was impossible for me to visualize images. And I used to heavily forget faces, places or shapes. I confuse people I already know with other people, Images just don’t stick in my head. But again. Visual education is not so much as a mental faculty but a system. I have a very particular system developed with experience and a formed visual language. So It doesn’t matter that I can’t visualize something in my head; Because I can get to any drawing pad and jot it down. Journaling is important for me. Often time I record the process I used to find a particular answer and keep them as “maps” to retrace my steps. As I developed more visually intelligence I got better at retaining images in my head. I feel my ADHD has a bit to do with it, because back when I was a kid it was difficult to find contextual cues, subtle proportional differences and cultural responses. I trained myself to get better at picking up on those over time, and my “aphantasia” feels less prominent today.

It is common for people who start learning a skill to talk that way; They believe they have a strong grasp on some kind of thinking and in practice they find out they are way behind… They call it Dunning-Kruger something? In people who are learning art or design i see it all the time, people talk about their “visual ideas” and then get frustrated because they can’t put them into paper. A lot of their visual ideas are Imitation without personality. When the student starts to develop a language they gain an added feeling of empowerment: They have connected many forms of knowledge and experience that once existed arbitrarily in their heads. They have a method a system and i repeat visual language. It’s one of the biggest tells of AI slop images in the wild. You can’t see a person, you see the diffusion model itself, and often times since diffusion models need to take information from training that casts a very wide net it looses any personality or distinct voice.

Lastly; we often confuse “making art” with “making a product” and forget that art is a form of communication itself. If people rely on translators instead of learning a language, do they really “think” in that language?

You can make a product: Write a novel in German even if you barely speak that language by inputting your English text into google translate and carefully and editing the output as best you can. But there is a communicative barrier between you and your product. You don’t really think in German, you don’t know the slang, and the nuances of the language by relying on the translator.

Having a linguistic concept in your mind does not mean you have a “complex visual idea.” The whole point of “practicing” is training your mind against it’s nature and start to think visually for the first time. The tragedy of AI image generation is that it keeps people from exploring that side of their imagination and learning to really see. they never really develop a visual language but instead take the prepackaged style of the llm vending machine. It is sad to think that a voice is lost because they traded the vulnerability of making something to getting a predetermined product and pretend they had something visual in their mind to begin with.