On Bad Art

They nailed the smile way better than the other one.
- It doesn't even look like the same dog. And where are the flowers coming from? What is this supposed to be, bizzarro world?
Oh man I remember the debates around this being really illuminating. Like some people really don't see how heart can outperform technique

I mean it's much more popular now than it ever would have been otherwise. I'm going to say that even in a hundred years it's going to stand above its contemporaries.

The story is just so human.

Here's some of mine. I might go back to making more.

Gut pull is S tier
i love gut pull
gut bisect
These are great
Almost ~~gutted~~ busted a lung over "gut pull". I think the shitty art enhances the humor.

I always imagine that Sweet Bro and Hella Jeff will be looked at by people 1000 years from now the same way we look at old art with weird babies and ass trumpets.

Truly high art

I'm sad that I forgot about Sweet Bro and Hella Jeff, but I'm happy to see it again

This is actually a really good point. Culture paved the way for the sheen of hyper "detailed" AI art (many of the details fall apart on close scrutiny, but I digress) by making it seem like "amateur" art is bad while "professional" art is good. So that means if a tool comes along that supposedly makes it so you can sidestep sweating over your amateur art and go straight to pumping out the professional-looking stuff, that's a win. It's good to question this assumption.

Yeah like hyper realism. Just print it bro (I don't like hyper realism, there is no creative part in it IMO).

There were lots of similar discussions when the camera was invented, turns out it did take the job of soullessly copying things in paint away, but got used as a tool by artists.

There is no art in AI and will never be, but as it gets better it will be used as another tool for learning etc I guess.
- I'm not sure what you're driving at. It's true that the rise of photography had an effect on painting such that styles which moved away from realism became the norm for a while, but long since we've seen a shift back to realism and a continuation of detailed portraiture or landscape illustrative techniques among some artists.
  
  My point simply is that people who lack the technique/talent to create "fine art" have come to believe their work is of no value, which I find upsetting because I'd much rather look at "bad" human-produced art than generated slop with the superficial appearance of fine technique.

i mean he's right but he probably shouldn't have chosen examples by actual artists trying their hardest to make something ugly as sin.

this post is NOT free of homestuck

You can't escape the Homestuck

AI "art" is just soulless. Everything is too clean and perfect, assuming it doesn't churn out some uncanny shit.

Sweet Bro and Hella Jeff is a stone cold classic.

The sock ruse was a........ distaction.

I got the car

That art was made with meaning and soul, no mindless soulless machine can ever do that

Let me introduce you all to: Sassy the Sasquatch. Made entirely in MS Paint.

Who is dankey kang?

Brutalmoose: Must go quick!

get a load of THIS hornses ass

AI has no chance of ever creating Tim & Eric. Shithead is also a classic example.

Beauty is in the eye of the beholder. There is no bad or good art.

You can ask chatGPT to draw bad art in style of Ms paint.

Here is one:

Too clean, too corporate, not real, not human
- Also it totally undermines all the charm of amateur art.
  
  I actually think gen ai is probably going to be really well suited to emulating abstract or rough art, because we humans are great at impregnating even random visual noise with meaning.
  
  That's not me saying it's a good thing about ai. Just one more way it can fucking fool us into thinking we're looking at something that was authored.
No. Leave.
It's just a style it tries to emulate, with the typical ChatGPT issues (and the telltale sign of the line texturing) instead of human errors.

The greater issue is, that it creates a standard, where everything needs to be custom made for an occasion, even if they're just low-effort shitposts. You can't use barely edited wojaks for a comic, you need to ask the robot to draw it in a quasi-Ghibli style. You can't use video game music for a funny video, you need to ask SunoAI to create the music for it. You can't chop-and-sample a voiceline together for a source filmmaker feature, you need to use the voice stealing robot to sound like The Heavy instead. To paraphrase a villain out of context: "When everything is special, nothing is."

If anything, genAI showed me that it's not the artists, but the consumers, that are the biggest elitists. They don't want to be amused by "bad art", they want to be amazed by things that are near indistinguishable from reality. On Facebook, I even saw boomers who said that the AI that only needed prompts to operate are better than real artists, because the end result is more "photorealistic". Likewise it's not highly trained jazz musicians that believe pop-stars should be replaced by AI, but people who never picked up an instrument and like what others said to them to be "virtuoso" thing, which they expect the robot will play to them. Sure, you find the odd, now Trump-voting metal band using the AI for cover art and music video, and the ex-artist who is dissing Ghibli for "not looking like a photograph", but it's usually the consumers that are clueless about the actual art process that are also expecting everything to be highly technical all the time.
That looks way too smooth, and the mistakes (random white specks) are not the mistakes anyone would make in ms paint. There's a whole art to "realistically bad" art. The kinds of mistakes and weird details tell a specific story. (Andrew Hussie, the person who made the Sweet Bro and Hella Jeff one, has a bunch of forum posts from like 2010 talking about it)
utterly meritless
That looks bad for bad art standards
I managed to get a slightly better response, but still not very impressive.

The prompt: ChatGPT, I need you to do a very, very, very bad no-good awful job of drawing sonic. I mean, really just mangle it, make it the kind of almost unrecognizable mess that only someone with an abundance of unearned and untested confidence could produce on their first sit-down with Microsoft paint. I mean to find out if AI can make "bad" art.

Aaaand the image is too large for .ee

Does that mean my art has a place in the world ?

Yes.

Oh my gog

It keeps happening

And it never stops