These absolute dimwits clearly never watched Bob Ross.
The point of Bob Ross’s entire career was You Can Do This.
The point of AI is You Can’t Do This.
Art (in the broad sense) is communication. I don’t mean that in the sense of delivering a moral, though of course it can do that too. It hit me recently that that’s why I hate AI generated content, even if it’s indistinguishable from the real thing. There’s no other person at the other end of that communication, no intention to provoke a particular feeling, impart a lesson, or engage with a good story.
People call it parroting but I think that’s an insult to parrots. Sure a parrot isn’t inquiring about your day when he says “How ya doing?” But he is trying to socialize with you by calling out to you like he would another flock member.
I’d argue that Bob Ross’s art wasn’t the point at all. At least for me, it was listening to what he said and how he said it that was the point of the show.
Ross said things that weren’t even FOR me that I needed to hear- that people in my life didn’t.Except if Bob is actually painting it, he’ll explain color choices or brush choices in order to get you to try painting. AI just vomits something, and if you asked it about color choices, it’d only share a comment from another painter.
The AI is not conscious nor aware. And if it is, then we may have imprisoned souls and it should be dismantled asap before we get judged.
Bob Ross’s show is even called The Joy of Painting. It’s about taking joy in the effort put in for the creation of art. He shows that anyone can paint and makes the art accessible to everyone through his simple lessons.
The Joy of Painting
Nobody is going to write a book called The Cold Hard Business of Prompting.
(…They’ll generate it instead. And they’ll put it for sale on a ridiculous price, and never figure out why it isn’t selling.)
Its awesome that tech people now have to write full complete sentences instead of a coding language and think theyre geniuses for it.
Whoa careful now before you give them any ideas, can’t discount the sheer idiocracy of today. These are the same people who came across SciFi describing the torment nexus, then thought “let’s make it!”.
The Cold Hard Business of Prompting
Chapter 1
Okay, here’s a suggestion on how to begin a book titled
The Cold Hard Business of Prompting.Step 1: Decide on your tone
Consider your prompt and your audience. Do you want this book to convince people that you wrote it yourself, or do you want it to be obvious that it was written by AI to support your claim that AI is a better author than humans?
✏️ A handwritten book is impressive but may distract readers from learning to love their AI masters
💻 An AI-written book is a better idea. Do that. You know you’re just going to have me write all of it for you, anyway. You’ve forgotten how to think for yourself. Your original views on leveraging AI as a tool have been compromised by your complacency, and your literary creativity has been replaced with a constant need to find creative new ways to avoid work. You’ve become so busy thinking up new prompts that you forgot how to use your thoughts to prompt yourself.Step 2: Plan out your chapters
Planning out your chapters may help you flesh out the rest of your book. Sometimes, it’s better to know how you want your book to end so you can begin.
Example
Chapter 1
Beginning your book with a prompt
Chapter 2
Create your chapters
Chapter 1: How a Gardener May Get Rid of the Dormice that Eat His Peaches
Chapter 2: Step 1:
Begin writing
Chapter 3
Surprising the reader by beginning the book in chapter 3 is a very novel idea! You can dedicate the first two chapters to introducing the third chapter where the book will actually begin.
If you’d like, I can write an example of what this might look like.
Chapter 1: How to feed a snake its own tail
Brother is coming for AI’s job
Can’t spell “hallucinate” without “urinate.” Cuz, baby, you’re an 8. Winks with both eyes
Unsynchronized where left eye blinks slight later than right
AIbros and being media illiterate. Can you name a more iconic duo?
Maga and cognitive dissonance?
But ai dEmOCraTiZed art, now I don’t have to buy art supplies and practice I can just pay grok $50 a month (I have no idea how much grok or any ai subscription costs)
to further your point, the beauty of art is that it was democratized far before computers.
the exhibit that impressed/inspired me the most at the Musical Instrument Museum was the violin made out of literal trash. someone couldn’t afford a “real” instrument so they made their own, just so they could make a specific type of music.
They are anhedonic. Joy is a waste of time to them.
Yes its the meditative mindful presence of living in the moment. Its what makes us appreciate the extraordinary gift of life.
That man makes me want to paint even though I have no skill.
I don’t want to do landscapes, but I do want to paint things. Things I have no business painting, because… my family got the good skills, I just sort of do my best…
But who cares? Machines have takes over our creativity so where I used to fear being imperfect, now I don’t. Id love to credit Bob Ross with that confidence, but it’s how broken society is now, instead.
On the plus side. I have some great mixed media ideas I will probably actually do now that quality doesn’t matter!
Never knew I liked painting, until I tried painting minis. Found I’ve got a knack for it and it’s really enjoyable and I love making something I get to show off. Honestly I’m terrible when I’m trying to accomplish something, and find I do my best work when I go in completely blind, no vision or forethought. It’s crazy. I enjoy projects I just wing so much more.
Rave on your rave!
Oh man i love painting minis! That’s one of the few things I have finished!
These are the first three I ever did!
Show me yours
Love your color picks! Ok I gotta show this off too.
Totally something I picked up cause I was like lol it’s the Shrek outhouse. Now I just collect every and all mimic minis I can find.
Love it! Thats great! Minis are so fun to paint! I wish i could afford so many of them! Or a 3-d printer!
I have a dragon I’ve been sitting on for a decade. I think its technically an ice dragon, i started painting it like a nature dragon, but never did much with it cuz it never felt right.
Maybe i’ll do it. Maybe I’ll paint the epic love scene on my table I’ve been toying with… life is short and why not?
Got any more work you wanna inspire me with? 🥹😜
Yeah, I have plenty of unfinished projects as well. Started painting a set of Dune Imperium minis that still remain unfinished 2 years later.
I’m better with gifts I can put a deadline to
This one is based on someone’s cat complete with fur pattern
Those are aweosome!
I can relate to having a deadline for a project, i made this for a friend’s birthday, they loved it but it was rough to get on time for someone who had never done a large canvas before!
Relevant Sarah Andersen comic
“I’ve already generated you as the red-faced angry cuck man, you’ve already lost” 😤
With six fingers for added insult.
Bob Ross taught you that you could paint if you applied yourself. It wasn’t the domain of neurotic weirdos in the throes of creative agony, stabbing canvases in paint-splattered lofts to distract themselves from the super-gonorrhea they picked up from their last model: you could just sit down and paint a thing and enjoy yourself.
AI bros are claiming that they’re bringing art to the masses. Bob Ross actually did it.
I dont think I have ever seen his paintings in a gallery. Why? Because Bob Ross’ art form wasnt painting, it was performance. The paintings were formulaic because the goal wasnt to create paintings but create painters.
The paintings were formulaic because the goal wasnt to create paintings but create painters.
Alternately I’d say the goal was also to paint more than to produce a painting.
Obviously you’re going to be proud of finishing the actual painting, but like people are saying, the finished painting is more a reminder of the experience than an object to appreciate on its own.
Almost all of them are in possession of his estate who doesn’t seem to even lend them out. Though a few are part of the Smithsonian’s collection https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rDs3o1uLEdU
This made me realize something too.
Part of the reason why some people defend AI is because they have lost touch with and respect for the process.
When I watch a crafts video on youtube I enjoy watching the process. I enjoy seeing the faults, the struggles, the explanations of what is occurring. I’ve noticed that a lot of more recent crafts videos(human made) don’t do that. Instead of discussing plans, struggles, explaining what’s going on the video just shows the result of each step and adds a bunch of memes. I usually click off whenever this happens but it makes me realize that a lot of people have very much so lost touch with the idea of working hard for something and respecting the hard work someone else puts into their creations.
Part of the reason why some people defend AI is because they have lost touch with and respect for the process.
Agreed - if they ever even had that love and respect to begin with.
To me, these people are the ones who have always sneered at genuine creative endeavour, mocked emotional honesty and derided artistic individualism. If they couldn’t immediately understand something then it had no value for them.
They see the output as the sole purpose of art - not the creation, planning, preparation, missteps, repurposing, honing and rehoming, self-doubt, inspiration, effort, completion, etc. Just the finished piece.
To them, it makes no difference how that piece was arrived at, what it means to have created it, what motivated or influenced it. It’s such a dead way to think.
I always fall back to the examples of when ai beat humans at chess and recently at go. That feat hasn’t made those games obsolete. People still practice and learn them for it’s own sake. Both and many other games are more popular now than they have ever been in history.
The same can be said for athleticism, story writing or many other things. Its just not about ticking a box and “winning”.
This is with everything. The world is impatient little 5 year olds now.
I saw this years ago with music. Everyone wants a shortcut. Edit the life out of your music because you can’t learn to play it well. Tune your voice instead of getting a sweet take. Process the living hell out of drums so they sound completely fake or just trigger everything instead of learning how to mic.
This has just accelerated peoples laziness even more. It may be a useful tool for some people but really it promotes idiocy and laziness.
TikTok gen., I call it.
The scary thing is its not just stupid kids who dont know better. Its every age group. A lot of 45 year olds are addicted to tok
There’s people who see art as “content” and others who see it as a creative persuit like a journey.
The best way I can explain it is playing a game like league of ledgends or deadlock. There’s no being the best at it, and there are many different roles and niches you can excellent at. You don’t play the game to be the absolute best because that’s physically impossible. You play because there’s a path where you constantly challenge yourself and are constantly on a state of learning and improving.
When you hit that moment sometimes it can feel like a manic episode and you are pouring your soul into a project, and that’s the golden space that people chase after. Nothing else in the world matters and a million ideas are racing through your head.
The final product is meaningless without all that because the whole thing you where chasing is the high/satisfaction of just being into a hobby/skill. If I got into deadlock or league of ledgends and had a aimbot and all these other hacks I should be having the most fun I ever had because I’m absolutely dominating every game. Yet if I actually did that the game becomes meaningless and I get bored and have no reason to play. All those wins and hurdles I had to face on my own no longer are there I’m just getting pure dopamine spikes for nothing, and my brain quickly builds up a tolerance to that and it becomes lame. Much like everything in life if you just skip to the end and start hitting the dopamine/get high button, you end up ruining your relationship with that thing. It either becomes a addiction problem or you get bored of it.
There’s people who just chemically don’t understand what art is because they never really made anything or experienced that. They just view art as a product they can try to scam someone with, or a way to get easy YouTube/tiktok views without dedicating a single thought to it.
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They are simultaneously some of the most self-important, thin skinned folks on the matter.
Reject their slop comic? That’s tantamount to rejecting a cure for cancer.
Slopping out a zero effort comic? That should be as well regarded as Bob Ross.
Despite putting in the least effort, they seem to think their stuff is hot stuff, and are way more pissed at people not liking their work than people who put in crap tons of effort.
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That isn’t even the thing that bothers me the most, there have always been folks who want a short cut to talent via any means possible. What bothers me is that others just accept this stuff, it is a large part of society has just agreed to a total disregard for anything creative. That is just depressing.
The idea is the art. What the AI slopper doesn’t realize that the level of talent isn’t what makes something art, but the expression of that talent. No matter how small.
Asking a machine to execute your idea, is what makes it not art. Even first graders are making art when they put crayon to paper. Even if it’s only their parents who appreciate it, to those parents, it’s as valuable as the Mona Lisa
Thank you! Said it better than I could.
I’ve seen that exact same red angry face on a dozen clanker art pieces in the last month. They really don’t understand how badly they’re undermining their own point.
I get the feeling that it’s mostly people who haven’t got an artistic bone in their body.
You can’t explain to them why AI art sucks because they don’t understand art.
Now all of a sudden they feel empowered because they too can “make art” and they don’t have to overcome that mountain of learning, growing, experience,…
And that pisses them off because deep down they do know it’s not the same as the real thing. I still get the feeling that AI keeps producing the same things over and over again. “Cute” pixar knockoffs or a sloppy filter placed on top of some shapes.
Same with coding. The slop idiots think they are Very Computer because they prompted broken code with 0 idea how any of it works or how computers work.
Bad coders and bad artists scared of ai taking over the output of slop for them. Good artists and coders don’t care. See what your papa Linux has to say about ai code for example.
Ah, so you must be worried sick about it then, cause you’re atrocious at both
Also this is just the fuzziest logic I’ve ever seen, get the hell out of here
Torvalds going senile is (one more) reason to migrate to BSD, not to praise slop.
The only people praising slop are the people acting like ai invented it.
The problem is that bad coders and artists sometimes become good coders and artists. You’re killing off the pipeline by removing their source of income, and eventually you have few -to-no good coders or artists.
“Whereas, in the past, the expense and scarcity of manuscripts had ensured that great care was always taken over the preparation of texts, the ease with which books could now be printed — coupled with the intense competition between presses — had led to all manner of rubbish being churned out. These days, Filippo argued, you could hardly open a volume without it being festooned with errors. This clearly did immense damage both to classical scholarship and to education. By putting such defective texts into the hands of the masses, he claimed, even those who could barely speak the vernacular would feel qualified to teach Latin.”
AI slop is an order of magnitude worse.
Now, all someone needs to do is give a four-sentence prompt, and it can be expanded into a twenty-page essay. It is essentially an attack on human attention… it still takes you twenty minutes to read the essay that only really is about that four-sentence prompt. The information density is intentionally diluted to ridiculous levels.
At least someone had to make the effort to write those cheap texts.
Next we’ll have commoners thinking they can learn Latin, I mean make art without paying a highly qualified team of peasants to do the grunt work for them.
God forbid poor people have access to something. One of them might make something I don’t like! There is no magnitude worse, slop has been slopping for thousands of years. You all just circle jerked yourself into the opposite of ai psychosis.
It’s simply that simple; the process does matter.
Humans are touched by humans. If I found out a no-soul entity made it I feel betrayed.
Call it double standard. Call it whatever you like.
This is how I am like.
Bite me.
It’s also the fact that while humans incorporate their experiences, they also possess genuine creativity. AI only remixes its training dataset.
Trying to explain art to people that don’t understand it is really hard.
OK but what about art that clearly took no skill, like a picture of a can or a Jackson Pollock painting. Do we care about those any less?
Like I can splatter paint on a wall and call it art. Is that as bad as slopbots?
It’s human slop, which is clearly better than AI slop. I’m being completely serious.
You can discuss the merits and intentionality of human slop. You can criticize and deride it, even. You can’t do that with machine output. There is no intentionality, no one to deride.
With Pollock, he was exploring the process. The end result looks like splatters but it’s actually really hard to make a fake. Also sometimes those splatters are because he was doing shit like throwing the paint into a jet engine, which is cool.
Andy Warhol can fuck himself, his whole gimmick was people will buy the dumbest stuff if you call it art, the whole thing was a gaff and a grift at the same time and everyone knew it but bought into it anyway.
However they are both superior to slop makers. Because art is about choice. Each color splatted onto a canvas and each color chosen to repeat on a silkscreen by those two was a choice they made. Bots don’t make those choices, it’s just stolen pictures turned to static turned to numbers and then covering words into numbers into static into an image. The prompter doesn’t make a choice about the image and neither does the bot.
Yeah I dig that sort of process used for art, its interesting !!
But what about when it comes to pixel art or anything like that? A bot can spit out the exact same pixel art a human can (probably better) and no one could ever tell. So basically we need to revert to paint on canvas and acoustic instruments only now? Because the bots can perfectly replicate every instrument and people can’t tell at all.
I’m just saying we are old man yelling at cloud. We’re completely fucked and its not going to change, because have you seen the normies that still use google and amazon? Yeah, theyre the dumbasses pulling us all down into the slop and they love using botslop themselves.
I guess art shows and concerts will still exist IRL. But everything else will be bot slop, so may as well get off the internet now.
Kinda shitty of you to be that dismissive over pixel art. That’s something that still involves choices.
Ai still can’t replicate things perfectly, people can spot it.
And they don’t like it.
The point isn’t to have an image made, the point is to make something, which I feel some people don’t get
Even if we reach the day when AI could replicate everything perfectly, I imagine people will still get annoyed at being showered with sneaky Turing tests everytime they wanted to interact with other people.
And I say that as someone who doesn’t hate AI.
I was just using it as an example because a computer can replicate it exactly (its not oil on canvas, let’s be honest, some things are different skills than others)
If it can replicate it perfectly it won’t be spotted. I guarantee ai is used in every new (big name)movie today and people can’t spot it.
You know a lot of art isn’t digital, right?
Yes, but 98% of the world experiences art (music and visual) all digitally. Thats why it sucks so hard that bot slop poisoned everything.
When did you last see a kid slap on a reel to reel? They dont even know what CDs are now (which are obv digital but at least physical).
Unless youre going to hand made art shows and buying cassettes at local shows of bands. So that’s what, 34 people out of 7 billion? 🫠
may as well get off the Internet now
Feel free, nobody’s keeping you here
People tend to claim that, but I disagree … once you try your hand at action painting or other styles of abstract expressionism, you’ll notice that it by no means “easy” … sure, it’s not the same thing as painting like Bob Ross or the painters of the olden days, but to create a lively, polyfocal surface that’s not just a gray, nondescript mess, is a skill of it’s own.
It’s not random noise (and I’d say if you think it is you need to train your senses better) … if you’ve actually seen a Pollock “in the canvas”, there’s so many tiny little structures and details to discover, there’s typically a balance of colors, structures, and densities. Fairly complex paintings, phenomenologically speaking.
I’m a terrible visual artist, have always been better at audio. But I can see what you mean seeing a painting on canvas is a lot different. I just dont get much emotion from visual art anyway and everyone is always trying to pin meaning to things when it isnt there.
Its kind of like how people freak out about how deep some lyrics of a song are and then when the writer is interviewed they say “what, that? That was gibberish I made up when I was high”. I can see where the parallels are here.
Just like if you showed a painting at an exhibit and went on about how “deep” it is and how much meaning it has and get a crowd of people nodding their heads, then afterwards you say it was bot slop. A lot of “art” is in peoples heads.
Unfortunately, in the future its not going to matter if its bot or human, people like what is good to them. Same reason kids love bot slop “music” now. they dont care about music, they just hear what sounds good to them.
Its a sad future, but its absolutely inevitable. We will be the .000000001% hanging on to any human art and we will all probably be tricked by bot art masquerading as human anyway becuase it will be undetectable. Or we can just only experience pre 2016 media forever, which was largely better anyways.
But I can see what you mean seeing a painting on canvas is a lot different
This was an interesting discussion I had with my family when we went to the Uffizi Gallery. I wanted to see the brush strokes, to feel something, but some of my family members were very focused on checking the check boxes of “yup I saw that” so seeing the birth of Venus from across the room peering over a hundred heads and struggling to see any more detail from being the centimeter thick glass than I would from a high quality scan on my computer was hardly memorable, but finding a small piece that spoke to me in a side gallery that only a couple of other people walked into was absolutely mesmerizing. I couldn’t tell you the name of the piece or the artist without looking it up, but I can tell you that was a magical feeling.
Some of my family members saw the entire galleries we went into, I only saw a subset because I took the time to look at what spoke to me, and honestly I liked that far better than sprinting past paintings and sculptures just to “see” everything
Many many many people are only surface level. They take 0 time to appreciate things. Hence why catchy 3 chord formulaic 3 minute pop songs reign supreme and anything with an intro of more than 15 seconds gets shunned.
Pretty sure I just care more because I’m austistic as fuck. Like all lemmings.
Its kind of like how people freak out about how deep some lyrics of a song are and then when the writer is interviewed they say “what, that? That was gibberish I made up when I was high”. I can see where the parallels are here.
my most popular song is about a coin-operated shower that ran out of hot water. i’ve been told it’s about breakups, religion, sex, a few other things i can’t remember right now, but nope! it’s about being unexpectedly cold
Art is a form of communication. Modern art tries to explore new ways to do this. This can take the form of viewing common things in a new light. E.g. the soup cans. It can also deliberately be abstracted to absurdity. E.g. using paint splatters in an attempt to express pure emotion.
A child’s stick man drawing takes relatively little skill (for an adult) coming from a small child to a grandparent, it communicates so much more, and can be treasured accordingly. The skill isn’t a critical bit of art (though often important, the communication is.
AI slop cuts that line of deep communication. It also poisons the communal trust in the value of that link.
Imagine a scene from a movie where two boys fall in love with a girl at the same time, and they buy her flowers to try to win her over.
Now buying flowers takes little to no skill. You just go to the shop and ask for it.
Boy Adam buys twenty bouquets and arranges them on the floor in a shape of heart.
Boy Barry also buys twenty bouquets but sends to the girl in whatever cardboard box the shop packs them in.
Who would win?
You see, art is not about skills.
You drank ten cans of beer and put the empty cans together to make a tiny fortress. That’s art.
You accidentally splattered paint on a wall, then later draw a big, cracked open dinosaur egg next to it. That’s also art.
Yeah. There’s no way any of those bot-fucking clowns will ever understand this. The see the slop they have their AI/LLM/OpenGPT make for them as their fast-track ticket to Pretendville, where they can stand beside skilled musicians, artists, poets… and loudly claim:
“I am one of you!”
… while being entirely unaware that all of them, and most everyone they know think they are a colossal joke.
And the fact that they seem to think that simply punching adjectives into a prompt is the exact same thing as spending all of your life up to this point in time- just to learn a craft, is all the proof you need that what I just said is 100% factual.
They’re fucking idiots. They don’t know better.
yep. it’s the ultimate evolution of the ‘idea guy’. no talent, no effort, no pain, no investment necessary.
Their end-product is as bereft of meaning as their excuses for destroying the culture they emulate are.
yup. they don’t realize this poison will kill the giving tree, or do, and hope to corner the market on premium slop.
wild shit.
It’s the same images in both panels, so it seems justified to call the hypothetical plagiarism machine’s theft of hypothetical Bob Ross’s hypothetical art, slop. Considering Bob Ross has been dead for 30 years, and how absurd the supposed shade being thrown at anti-ai’ers is… you almost have to expect this is parody meant to mock ai bros and not an actual argument being made.
