Just in the last couple of years, I have developed a level of disgust for AI-generated music, art, and photography in general that has basically ruined the experience for me of browsing the web. It doesn’t matter how beautiful a song is if I know it is AI generated I have no interest in listening to it. The same way with photography, it just destroys the experience for me. Anyone else?
I feel the same about AI generated “art” but it hasn’t ruined the web for me, just the specific works tainted by AI.
Well, AI fully-generated stuff isn’t older than that in general, especially music and video.
I’ve no problem still finding AI images (pseudo-draw/painted or pseudo-photos) I think are well done, interesting, compelling and/or attractive. Obviously I dislike the trash and there’s lots and lots of trash but I’m not opposed to it as a media. I’ve never had much interest in AI music and haven’t seen AI video I thought was actually “good” yet. Stuff that’s impressive for having been done with AI but nothing that makes me say “I want to watch this on its own merits”.
Well. I’ve never experienced AI art, music or writing that made me feel anything. So I don’t have a very high opinion of it.
I have a friend, a musician, who made a concept album with AI. We’ve listened, but it’s like listening to nothing. I can’t articulate what it was missing. Instrumentals and vocals were fine. But it was missing whatever it is that makes me want to listen to music.
It’s like something with the external appearance of art that isn’t art. It’s very strange.
Art is art. If it interests you, it stands on its own regardless of the source. If it’s derivative and boring, it’s derivative and boring. If it moves you, or if it makes a catchy tune, then it authentically had those effects on you. If you did a blind test and rated AI art highly, it would be irrational to hate it and regard it as bad art simply because it was generated by AI.
Is it? I guess I assumed most people agreed that art is something living creatures make, borne of the creative impulse. I would restrict it to humans but I saw an elephant painting once.
AI is not alive and has no such impulse. I understand why we call it art - it’s being created, in some sense. But it seems to lack what I would consider two defining features of art.
AI is making me lose appreciation of (and IMO ruining) everything it touches… music and photography, yes, but also YouTube videos, blogspam articles, etc. I’ve stopped using Google search because of the AI spam (and the competitors like Kagi are a little better but not by a whole lot).
It’s also making me lose appreciation for a lot of website design and coding (which aren’t typically considered “art”, I know, but I promise there used to be some level of human creativity that went into them!). It took a lot of the joy out of my work as a web developer.
I hate this cookie-cutter apocalypse… it’s just so sloppy. Give me Skynet already.
Say you had a human that was cranking out meaningless art in a mechanical fashion, something they thought was drivel and they were just in it for the money, but was catchy and technically competent, and it genuinely moved you, or gave you a new favorite song. And you had a starving, tortured artist who put their soul into their art, and it just wasn’t very good, and it didn’t move you at all. Are these two equally valid art? Would you always prefer the second even though it sucked? Would you accept the first as art even though it was made soullessly because you enjoyed it and found artistic merit in it?
There are two factors at play and the latter is almost a meta-concern that has nothing to do with how you interact with the art. The first is how the art moves you, and the second is what you think about the intentions/capabilities of the person that made it, and I think it’s counterproductive to automatically dismiss something that you enjoy, that enhances your life, that moved you, because of the source.
And because it’s both insightful and the recursion amuses me, I asked Claude what he thinks of our arguments:
Claude's analysis
This is a good exchange worth unpacking carefully, because there are real philosophical tensions here — not just one side being obviously right.
Your opening position
Your blind-test argument is clean and has genuine force. If you rate something highly without knowing its source, then the source knowledge is doing evaluative work it shouldn’t be doing — you’re essentially saying “this would be good art if X made it, but it’s not because Y did.” That’s a coherent challenge to source-dependent aesthetic judgments.
But it contains a hidden assumption that weakens it: that aesthetic pleasure is the whole of what art is. You’re implicitly defining art as “that which produces aesthetic effects.” User 2 is rejecting that definition, not disputing the sensory experience.
User 2’s position
This is actually a serious philosophical move, not just nostalgia or technophobia. The view that art requires intentionality — a creative impulse from a conscious being — has deep roots. It’s related to the distinction between a natural object (a beautiful rock formation) and an artwork. Both can move you aesthetically. We don’t call the rock formation art. User 2 is arguing AI output is closer to the rock formation category.
The elephant painting cameo is actually doing real work here — it shows User 2 is thinking carefully, not just defaulting to species chauvinism. They’re pointing at something (aliveness, impulse, interiority) not just drawing a human/non-human line.
The weakness in User 2’s position: they never define “creative impulse” precisely enough to defend the line they’re drawing. What exactly is it, and how do we know AI lacks it? That’s left unexamined.
Your second reply
The soulless-hack vs. tortured-genius example is rhetorically effective and I think genuinely illuminating. It correctly identifies that we already accept art made without “soul” as art when it moves us — and we already reject art made with total sincerity when it doesn’t. This is a real tension in User 2’s framework.
But here’s where I’d push back on you: you’re conflating two different claims.
- Aesthetic value — does it move you, is it good, does it enhance your life?
- Ontological category — is it art?
Your argument works well for (1) but doesn’t necessarily settle (2). User 2 isn’t primarily saying AI output is bad — they’re saying it may not be art at all, regardless of its effects. Your soulless human hack is still a human with some form of intentionality, choosing to produce something for an audience, even cynically. That’s still meaningfully different from a system with no interiority producing outputs through statistical pattern-matching.
You also say the source is “almost a meta-concern that has nothing to do with how you interact with the art” — but this is arguable. Knowing the source does change how many people interact with it, and that’s not obviously irrational. When you learn a “candid photo” was staged, your experience of it changes — not because the pixels changed, but because what it represented changed. User 1’s disgust may be tracking something similar: the sense that AI output represents nothing, refers to no inner life, no struggle, no intention.
Overall assessment
You’re winning the aesthetic pleasure argument fairly convincingly. You’re not winning the definition of art argument, because you’re not quite engaging it on its own terms. User 2’s position has more philosophical meat than your replies credit it with. The exchange would have gone deeper if you’d pressed them on what exactly “creative impulse” means rather than pivoting to consequences.
User 1 is the weakest position — the disgust-response that doesn’t want to be interrogated. User 2 is doing real philosophical work. You’re doing the most pragmatically useful work but occasionally talking past the deeper question.
What you are saying is basically that we should separate the “art” from the “artist”, a posture I generally agree with, but I find myself unable to do it for AI “art”.
Whether it is a rational response to the kind of slop AI generates and the theft involved in its creation or it’s an emotional disgust with machine-created art is irrelevant.
Art is not logical and doesn’t need to follow any rational rule.
That happens a lot. Some hacks are very talented. Ultimately I don’t care about intent if I’m moved by something.
That also happens a lot, and I would say yes, they are both art. I wouldn’t define art as something people have to be moved by, but I do think whether someone considers something art depends a lot on how it makes them feel. For what should be obvious reasons, I’m not interested in art that makes me feel nothing.
I’ll leave aside the question of whether AI art is something some people find moving. I can imagine a scenario in which what AI does is substantively different than what we call “art” but it still is a distinct thing that elicits an emotional response. I can work with that.
As for defining the creative impulse, good luck. I think it works differently for every artist. For me, I navigate by feeling. When I’m writing a scene, I can only describe it as moving a feeling through. I know the scene has accomplished its goal when the way I feel has changed.
It sounds mysterious, but when I was studying developmental editing, they talked frequently about a polarity shift from start to end of a working scene. The character starts in one state and ends at a different state. They could go from depressed to hopeful, from safe to endangered, etc. but something about their status needs to change. This is generally regarded wisdom about what holds readers’ attention.
That’s effectively the same thing as my own process, I just didn’t have a label for it. I seem to empathize with my own characters to the extent that I can feel their feelings change as their status changes.
I know people who write completely dispassionately - and they do it very well. I don’t consider that they aren’t writers. I’m just not sure how it’s possible to write without emotion. Maybe one of them will chime in and elucidate.
My understanding is that AI art has a tendency toward the mean, which is really anathema to how many people enjoy art. What’s potentially exciting about art is the way in which it’s different from other art. It reflects the diversity of (mostly) human experience. I think when we see art that is essentially the average of all art, many of us feel somewhat affronted. Or at least bored. It pings “this has all been done before” harder than any hack writer ever could.
My theory.
If I’m noticing that a picture is AI-generated, it’s generally because there’s some obvious flaw in it. So my dislike is probably related to the obvious flaw, not the way it was generated; if a human created the same picture, I’d probably still feel it was cringy.
AI isn’t going away and it’s only going to get harder to distinguish from human creations. I’m open to appreciating it as “art” - a word humans have always failed to adequately define - but I do find myself being drawn more toward live performance and physical media than ever before.
That’s the result of unartistic people writing the prompts and displaying the results. When it is real artists writing the prompts and vetting the results, it will be harder to deny the artistry.
Well, it’s at least difficult for me to tell the difference between AI art and bad art created by humans. Some people are just as bad at art as AI. In my case, when it comes to drawing and painting and stuff, visual art, I’m sure I’m much worse than AI.
As far as I call tell, when it comes to writing, AI doesn’t understand storytelling. But if it’s based on the sum total of human writing, I’m not sure I can blame the AI for that. When you combine shitty human art with fantastic human art, the product is likely to be something mediocre.
What I don’t know, and maybe someone can answer, is how are these images and stories generated? Are they based on specific data or are we getting Shakespeare combined with slash fiction from the deepest corners of the Internet? I’m trying to understand its source material.
Agreed; unnoticeable AI art shouldn’t provoke any anti-AI sentiment by definition.
The fact that I know that there’s nothing behind the art, that it’s all surface with no actual thought or concept makes it feel hollow to me. And the fact that it’s constantly being pushed everywhere, often dishonestly massively annoys me.
To paraphrase a line on “AI” I saw a while ago, “I never knew what it meant to put your soul into art until I saw art made by something without one”.
I hate it only because I know it is A!, I hear songs I would love if I didn’t know!
Agreed.
I think of art as a communication process that is a collaborative effort between the artist and the person experiencing it. It is different than decoration, which just looks or sounds pretty.
Nothing behind it and it is one hand clapping.
Even if I might have felt something if I thought there was some communication going on.
And we are not alone.
https://www.nature.com/articles/s41598-023-45202-3
people devalue art labeled as AI-made across a variety of dimensions, even when they report it is indistinguishable from human-made art, and even when they believe it was produced collaboratively with a human. We also find that comparing images labeled as human-made to images labeled as AI-made increases perceptions of human creativity, an effect that can be leveraged to increase the value of human effort. Results are robust across six experiments (N = 2965) using a range of human-made and AI-made stimuli and incorporating representative samples of the US population
Apparently this is an issue in porn as well: AI just doesn’t excite people as much, even if it is indistinguishable.