Lime Bar @limebar@mastodon.social
I am a little shocked at the lack of solidarity I see between artists working in different mediums wrt genAI.
Musicians who would never use it to make music use it to make cover art
Graphic artists reach for it to make music over their videos
Writers use it to illustrate their articles
And, considering software development an art, many use it to create web sites or apps to host their art.
None of this is necessary. All of this is harmful to the other artists.
Collaborate ffs.
Stop it.
Aug 09, 2026, 12:17 AM
BASED
As a musician, and as a friend of many graphic artists, writers, programmers, designers, and other kinds of artists, I hate how many people just think in their own benefit. Like, they don’t seem to understand that’s one of the main problems, because while I use AI to create cover artz and at the same time complain about not having enough demand and about my music being stolen, which takes away my opportunities to work, a graphic artist/cartoonist could be using AI to make music for their showcases/shelves and complaining about not having enough demand and about others (me, in this case) stealing their art. What I mean is, we’re both harming each other and reducing our net benefit margin, thus leading to a Pareto suboptimal.
EFF leading by example in their post yesterday Who (or What) Generates Images for EFF?
Legends
I do music and other art. I did use early AI to make a few music videos because I liked the jankyness of it all. How it was strange and surreal - like a dream. If anything, it was more of an experiment in a medium that wasn’t ready.
I don’t use any AI today except to mock it. I reject it as much as possible.
Yeah, there was a period there where it was super interesting to explore and learn about. As a technology, it still is! But as a corporate product, it’s the essence of everything that’s wrong with capitalism - no real value in most cases, manufactured needs, embrace-extend-extinguish, and no down about to hit the hard downslope on the enshittification curve too.
Could it be a symptom of everybody being broke af and not wanting to ask someone to work for exposure? Because a lot of artists are lucky enough to make enough money to cover their expenses for doing the art, let alone anything else.
I would love to see more collaborations and rejection of AI for everything but the tasks that are actually a decent use case (preliminary searches and compiling massive pools of data) and I think one of the best way to start is to just pay people a living wage.
With how bad AI art is, I kind of wish that artists would be ok letting their work stand on its own. Like does an album need a cover or an article graphics if it’s just the equivalent of visual static. It’s not really elevating the piece any, it’s just there to fill a void. Make it ok to have stand alone pieces again!
Yeah i mean ive seen some straight dogshit album covers for good music. Its not like the cover sells the thing anyways.
Royalty free music is pretty cheap to come by and coding isnt that difficult.
If you need a thing and cant pay for a thing, then learn to do the thing. A shit job is better than ai generated imho
coding isnt that difficult.
What programs have you written?
I was triggered by that statement too and about to throw a rant, but I think they mean it like “creating a webpage”, using stuff like wordpress and the like, because they’re an artist who wants to show off their portfolio or something.
There’s a lot of “DIY” that abstracts away the actual programming part, so others can just build what they need easily.
Im a software developer by trade. Originally for a msp combining several companies’ backups and Outlook info (locally hosted and 365) into a single SQL backed dashboard, now under an NDA.
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Seriously! I yearn for the old days of really crappy photoshop album covers! They’re at least an earnest expression of what the band is trying to convey
The existence of AI art is currently the most convincing proof I have ever seen of the existence of the human soul.
Exactly. The Beatles released an album with a blank white cover. It was brilliant. There’s really no need to fill every space with slop.
You can literally take a photo on your phone and add some text in gimp. No one buys music for the cover art (I do acknowledge that good cover art adds something, but it’s not usually make or break).
I’ve had CDs in the past that were just one color with the name of the artist/band and the album name. Nothing else. No one cared either because it would just be thrown into the CD zip up case or a cd holder attached to the sun vizer.
ehh. i sort of do use cover art as a filter tho, especially when i am looking for things like death metal or crust on bandcamp, a hand-drawn or collaged cover that looks very grotty and possibly by others’ standards “not very good” is something i will click on and probably end up buying. i have found a lot of bands i like that way, generally if they are using that style of artwork they will be my jam. it’s not pointless visual static to me, it’s additional information about how the album will sound.
Can also be that people react badly to AI in areas where they have some knowledge and taste, but are too ignorant to care in other areas. I’m a prolific reader and (imho) an ok writer, so I’m revolted by AI slop in written text. But I’m a moron when it comes to art, so I’m I haven’t been too bothered by AI art per se. Of course that it comes from chewing up and spitting out human artists’ work is revolting too, but that’s separate and more distant.
My dream is to be a published author. I would sooner release a book with no art than use genAI art.
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That is some serious mental gymanstics just to get around outright saying “Well actually, I think there are a few things we SHOULD use slave labour and scorch the earth for…”
“GPTs as a technology have real, practical, beneficial uses for large-scale data analysis; we should prune our usage back to those.”
“Wow, so you think SLAVERY is OKAY and we should DO SLAVERY??”
In two years on this utterly grassless threadiverse I don’t think I’ve said this yet:
Touch grass.
Slave grass???!!!??? From grass slaves???!??
it’s interesting how many creatives and professionals see ai as being perfectly able to replace anyone’s work who isn’t theirs, but unable to replace them. i remember seeing a post about storyboarders thinking ai was unfit for storyboards, but good for concept art, and concept artists thinking ai was unfit for concept art, but fine for storyboards.
everyone sees the value in their work, but many can’t see the value of other people’s work, and think an ai-generated approximation that’s “good enough” is fine to replace it… it’s kinda sad, really
the exception is software developers, who are more than eager to replace their own work with ai-generated garbage. i don’t know why so many software devs have so little respect for themselves and their work, but i can’t say i’m surprised honestly.
Was going to post the same thing. It’s not just the arts either, all branches of academia seem to be suffering from this.
i don’t know why so many software devs have so little respect for themselves and their work
A lot of the dev process is tedious as fuck. I’ve never met a developer who enjoys writing tests, for example. That plus Agile/kanban long since totally dehumanized the development process by treating devs as fungible engineering units.
Also like every 5 minutes there’s a new framework and tool that will become obsolete 5 years later and people don’t want to keep learning all of them while every project does their own thing. Programming slop started long before AI took over (looking at you JavaScript)
As a software dev, most of the devs I know hate AI like everyone else. Perhaps more so since many of us took AI classes and understand what AI’s are actually useful for.
Vibe coders are the ones ive seen love LLMs since now they cam be software developers too.
Also a software engineer that did NLP research projects in university (pre-LLM days). You can imagine how hair-pullingly stupid I think all of this is as someone that is very familiar with how these models work and are trained.
It should be blindingly obvious that this shit shouldn’t be trusted with anything important, yet here we are. A little while ago I watched as one of our senior devops guys was using an LLM to execute scripts/commands for migrating a legacy production environment to a new environment, which was something that we had been meticulously planning for months as it was very complicated. But here he was, cowboying his way through it with an LLM that could have easily done a ton of damage with a single mistaken command. And we were watching this happen over a screen share.
Things did go wrong, but fortunately the problems were minor enough that we could fix it easily enough. It could have been so much worse though.
Nah there’s a lot of propaganda going around about LLMs and programmers. There’s some real die-hard advocates who think their own experiences project to the whole industry. It’s fucking awful at specialised domains with large proprietary codebases. Even if you get past needing a complete lack of moral backbone it just doesn’t make any sense to use in a lot of codebases - not that companies aren’t about to learn an expensive lesson about why.
Software developers are used to basically making themselves obsolete, just to then be more productive. Inevitably, it always ends with non-developers not actually wanting to understand the new fancy tool, and developers just now using that new tool to be more productive.
I think with software dev, most current devs with some years of experience will end up fine. It’s the juniors that are fucked, because AI is genuinely better than them in most ways a suit cares about.
Everyone knows the nuances of their own work because they are closer to it
I hate the pyramid scheme feeding money into billionaire pedo cults of AI and have tried to use local models without getting them working properly yet.
But a job steals my time. In there I must use AI tools to get what I need or I won’t have a home or food.
Outside of it, I know the creative skills but simply don’t have the resources after they’re depleted by the system. So I build with agents. It’s not perfect but my projects shouldn’t be, they just need to progress. Human time is left for QA, and whatever leftover creative energy remains, I can spend offline.
All in all it’s a bummer and also circumstances
If I see an AI image for a song on spotify, there’s a 90% the music is too.
I’m just going to take a moment to appreciate that they considered software development an art. It’s a rare moment.
It’s funny how many non-programmers see programming as a repetitive and boring task… Like, the whole point of it is to take boring repetitive tasks and automate them away. And the bits that are really well understood are the bits you don’t need to deal with, because there’s already libraries for that. Definitely an art (or a craft at least).
It’s funny how many programmers see it the same way. Actually bugs the shit outta me, haha.
Same to mathematics then again the relationship most people have with math is a far cry from the hopefully ingenious, and creative labor of what mathematicians do. Most just remember suffering to learn rules discovered by others and themselves never getting the chance to do the discovering.
I love maths, did a major in it (plus a summer project). But its also one of the hardest things I’ve ever done, and I never did anything that felt remotely like discovery or like creativity (though I agree it is creative). It’s in a league of it’s own in terms of dedication required, IMO.
What branch of math did you study (assuming you got a graduate degree)? I was more so in CS so had a heavy discrete math background. I particularly love graph theory. I think with applied math in CS you’re often asked to do something new-ish with designing algorithms. That said I also didn’t discover anything.
It was in a science degree, so I could just choose any topics, as long as they were at the right level. I think third year I did topology and number theory, and a mix of stuff in lower years.
One of my favourite things is to watch a programmer wax poetic about the beauty they see in good code.
It tangentially reminds me of “clocking screws”, a practice in which one screws in flathead screws such that the slots are all aligned . It’s easy to do, but a lot of faff; manufacturing variances means that each screw will require a slightly different number of turns to be sufficiently tight, so you need to:
" Line up the screw so the slot is aligned vertically- Screw it in until it’s tight
- If the slot is not aligned vertically, estimate how far off from ideal it is (i.e. if the slot ended up horizontal, then that’s around 90° off from what you want)
- Unscrew the screw, and line it up again, accounting for the angle you estimated in the previous step
- Screw the screw back in and repeat the process if necessary.
It takes a lot of skill to reliably gauge how to do, especially because repeated screwing and unscrewing the screw can loosen the hole enough that it affects the process. Even for skilled craftsmen, it’s an absurd level of work for something that, even when flathead screws were more common, most people would never notice. Nowadays, the only place I’m likely to see clockable screws are at old churches or similar
It’s so persnickety and silly, but that’s why I love it. I imagine that the craftspeople who care(d) about this stuff were a lot like today’s programmers who wax poetic about elegance in their code. It makes me so happy whenever I peer underneath a century old pew and see clocked screws, because it makes me think about the person who put such care into a part of their work that next to no-one would even see, let alone appreciate. It is especially nice because I imagine that many of these craftspeople were of a socioeconomic class that were thought unable to appreciate Beauty and Art.
No matter the field, people will find ways to impart Beauty and Art into their craft.
Hah, for sure, that’s crazy, and I’d never be bothers, but I’d be very impressed of I saw someone else do it!
The reality is that almost no self sustaining artists can afford each other’s work. Instead artists are forced to charge prices other artists would consider their entire grocery bill. Instead they have to hope they can either get patronage from the wealthy or some sort of corporation.
AI is churning out low quality products at a high rate. artists i see offer commissions around 20 bucks at a significantly higher quality than AI. while you won’t get the mona lisa anywhere for 20 quid, it is about the same price as chat gpt go costs you per month.
usually you don’t need the magnum opus of an artist for supporting art. you need good quality, which for an experience artist is achievable in reasonable time and money. support eachother!
I’m in a band and we drew our first art and logo, sold merch and albums, now we pay local artists for commissioned art. We plan on never using AI for anything. It’s really not hard if you respect other artists as much as you respect yourself.
“I’m an artiste, machines shouldn’t do what I do, those other folks have it easy.” repeat for every group thinking of every other group.
I’m struggling with this as a software dev. I don’t think writing software is “art”, but it is creative.
Why should it be acceptable for me to use it and other fields not?
This is after coming to terms that LLM’s are here to stay for the tech industry. Despite all the very real and valid negatives of it, it writes decent code if you babysit it well enough. Even after OpenAI and Anthropic collapse I don’t see it going away.
I think a big part of the problem is that most people just can’t afford each other.
Sure, you can do “paid in kind” (which has it’s own complexities) but mainly there’s so many overheads in life, as well as middlemen extorting out their cut that hiring a creative is cripplingly expensive.
It’s something only affordable to either those with a lot of disposable income, or those who are planning to make a hefty profit from it (and won’t be worrying about money in the meantime either).
Even in times when I was making the same income as a plumber, the idea of hiring one was deeply financially intimidating. Even an independent one. The way it’s stacked, you can only afford to hire people in a lower class/caste/tax-bracket than yourself.
100% this. They couldn’t afford each other before. Just because AI options are cheap and fast doesn’t make them able to afford real work suddenly.
Yep. And people want to work on something they’re passionate about. So unless you’re actively collaborating all through the creative process, it’s mostly going to be one person’s creative vision. You can say that the music video is a collaboration between the animator/effects artist and the musician, but if the musician has something specific in mind that they want to make, that’s not going to feel like a collaboration for the video artist,it’s going to feel like a commission. Which no one wants to do for free.
See also: People who HATE AI, but still use it to make/upscale their “memes.” Was somewhat common in reddit the “this is the only good use of AI” crowd.
“It’s only good when I use it.”
People mostly think it is good for creating absurd memes (like 🅱️) which there is some truth to that as AI can generate some trippy shit when you don’t give it enough information. But even absurd memes are a form of communication and to me an AI generated meme is somebody screaming random unintelligible words.
That’s kinda how it works for any other AI generated medium too. I used to not understand what it meant for art to be a form of communication. Seeing devoid of meaning but aesthetically pleasing AI generated pictures in contrast to real art made me understand it.
Machine learning is awesome for upscaling though. It is just that people using AI upscaling and frame generation on everything are idiots.
People converting animation purposefully drawn in 20fps to 60fps, completely ruining the storyboardy aesthetic and smear frames.
Or people who use ML upscaling as a full replacement for existing upscaling algorithms (bilinear, nearest neighbor etc.) with no consideration for source material to be scaled. ML upscaling may be good for games and realistic pictures, but please for the love of god stop AI upscaling text and flat design images.
Everyone thinks AI can do everyone else’s job except their own.
I personally don’t think so, and will not disrespect people by using it. It’s just amazing how the fad at work went with everyone posting how they were going to automate away every other job responsibility but theirs. The crazy part is how eager they shared their concepts with the very people they were basically saying were obsolete.
To be fair, they said that about mechanization/ automation too. Yet here we are. Artisans will always talk finesse, and skill, while thinkers will speak of logic and higher order thinking. Both are right.
AI can do any job. Doing the job with finesse and originality, not so much. But it will do it adequately, expediently, and repeatably. It will never get bored, (so long as that is not programmed into it) and does not require rest, food, or recuperation time. If a robot breaks, it can either be repaired and be back to work in hours or days or be replaced instantaneously with no troublesome moral entanglements regarding ending a person’s lively hood.
You can hate them all you want, but from a purely CBA perspective, it’s plain to see why there’s’ a move to it.
As CGP Grey put it in his fantastic video on the subject: Not everyone wants a triple press fair trade soy macchiato with oat milk foam; most just want a decent cup of coffee.
But it will do it adequately, expediently, and repeatably.
LLMs have a key weakness in that they aren’t repetitive. They come up with a new solution to the job every single time they’re prompted. Sometimes it can do the job adequately and expediently, sometimes it produces nonsense, and you’ll never know when.
The c-suite have convinced themselves that LLMs don’t have this flaw and that they can be treated like any other automation, that they can be relied on to do the same thing over and over, and then reality intrudes when they find out these are probability engines.
The chatbots can’t actually do any job.
I’m not talking about chatbots. AI can be tailored to suit the need. You wouldn’t expect a receptionist to do the job of the engineer anymore than you’d expect Excel spreadsheets to operate a CNC machine.
The OP is obviously about chatbots, so, I’m not sure why you aren’t talking about chatbots.
I’m talking about ALL AI. Narrowly defining them to just chatbots skews the scope of the discussion on the matter, IMHO.
Cnc is numerical data. Excel can do numerical data very well, and can export cad files that will control cnc machines.
Source: i do this sort of automation as part of my work, and have seen excel run pacman in the spreadaheet using the cell background colors as pixels.
Its more a matter of people in outside fields not understanding the work people do and the tools people use.
Sorry. Had to put that in there.
just because a hammer can drive a screw if your determined enough doesn’t meant that’s the optimal way to go about it.
or to put it another way:
AI can do any job.
It can’t do every job, or else it would have happened. There’s a lot of limitations that prevent it from accomplishing even the most basic facets of some jobs.
Ironically, especially the manual labor jobs not already replaced by robots are some of the toughest nuts to crack with AI. For example, any task where a human starts to have a hard time just by putting on some gloves, we don’t have ways to feed the AI the usual set of inputs that the human is acting on that is needed to properly imitate the behavior.
On the front of dealing in fact based work, LLMs don’t really deal in ‘facts’ but facts are very highly correlated to the narrative, so it can frequently do a passable job, but it is factually incorrect a fair amount of time and if the facts actually matter, then it’s a tricky scenario. If you can hook it up to a feedback loop where mistakes are both harmless and fed back into the model for a retry, then you can significantly mitigate this drawback, but it’s not always feasible to do this.
Now perhaps it can ‘do’ every purely fictional output of text, audio, images, and video, which would be the topic of the post. The stuff we were kind of hoping to be freed up to do as fun and rewarding art. Instead, it’s the first thing that is ‘nailed’ by AI as far as corporates are concerned freeing up people to be those plumbers and HVAC technicians instead of doing art, and we get stuck with the most milquetoast slurry of slop to consume instead.
What I mean when I say “AI can do any job” is that it is “Plausible for AI to learn and do the job.” That this or that job in particular is not currently AI completable is not the point I’m making. This is akin to the “Batman can defeat every enemy with enough prep time” argument.
Unfortunately I’m pessimistic it will ever happen. AI rewards you with what you want (or a mimic of it anyway) for not talking to people. Which feeds the largest insecurity all artists have, expressing themselves and connecting with others outside their art.
I think there is a real trap of not caring about the side to the product that you didn’t create. I fell for this trap. I made music, used AI for cover art way before this conversation was happening and people were mad about data centers and all that, years ago now. People were mad that art was used to train it without their permission but the novelty of the thing was the loudest voice at the time.
Later I realized that AI cheapens your entire product, whatever it is. If I use AI for the cover art, people will think I used AI for the music (I didn’t). I went back and did the art myself for everything I could to eliminate as much AI bullshit from my music, just so it wasn’t giving people the wrong idea.
I think everyone is realizing this, AI just makes everything else look like slop. It’s not a “neat” tool anymore. The novelty has been dead for at least a year. No one gives a fuck that you can generate Spiderman as ancient Japanese scroll art. Now it’s just, “oh god some CEO is trying to push more slop”.
It’s not that people are always trying to be cheap or something. Sometimes they just want to focus on the core part of a project, like game devs the programming, musicians the music, painters the paint, animators the animation, etc. An animator isn’t trying to avoid working with someone else or trying to avoid paying a musician. They just want to present their art and choose something that works with it. AI made it really easy to ask for literally anything, when normally people would scrape for CC0 license stuff. AI became the most convenient option to slap something else on it that fits the vibe you want. Now, it looks or sounds like shit, but honestly I think it was always about convenience.
It literally happened for nearly a century…
I think what they mean is that AI is to some artists what an opioid addiction is to people with severe pain. I believe in our ability to crawl out, but it is a ditch we’ve fallen into.
IIRC that “You wouldn’t download a car!” piracy screen used it’s music and font without a license.
It’s selfishness, not any sort of consistent belief system. AI that undermines me is the worst thing ever, but I’ll use AI that shits on other people without a second thought.
IIRC that “You wouldn’t download a car!” piracy screen used it’s music and font without a license.
IIRC that’s mostly a myth. Another similar ad in the Netherlands used pirated music, not the ad the majority of the world is familiar with. The font however, is kinda complicated since it was resold without permission, and they bought the resold version, or something like that.
Edit: Just checked the Wikipedia, the font was rebranded as a different font, so whoever making it didn’t know it was a paid font.
I have an old buddy who’s a pretty accomplished tattoo artist, and as goes is also a pretty good artist in many other ways- pen/ink, paint, etc. We have a few of his hand drawn or painted pieces hanging on our walls.
I saw sometime last year that he was proudly telling everyone about his AI art shop on Etsy…selling art he was just having AI generated and printed via whatever those shops that just print whatever you want on whatever you want and drop shipped to you. …so sad…
