Thoughts on the intersection between consuming, producing, and commerce
I recently went to take a look at how the term "Art" is doing according to the internet, namely, Google, who owns a majority of our navigational pathways in this digital space. I wanted to see how art fared in the search market.
Not great if I'm being honest.
The Bad
Ai art generator dominates the airwaves. Biggest search volume of anything under the "art" umbrella. DeviantArt also has huge volume, not a bad thing, but with the integration of Ai art to the platform, not a huge win for original artists.
Under an Art search you'll also find Ai art (sans generator), Art the clown (we see you Terrifier 3), and martial arts, which I have no problem with.
So, why is Ai art generator dominating search functionalities? Is it because of it's commercial potential? Because Ai is so creatively intelligent that it stands to replace hundreds of designers at a fraction of the cost?
Maybe, but I don't think so. Not right now at least.
Consumers & Producers
There are two types of people in the world, those who consume more than they produce and those who produce more than they consume.
There are natural rules that govern this, as anyone making something worth consuming will not have the time to engage in sizeable consumption, and vice versa.
Artists tend to live somewhere in the in-between. Intentional consuming for inspiration, matched with diligent and thorough periods of creation. It’s not that artists are not consumers or producers in the majority, but they live on the border, straddling what’s easy and what’s difficult.
If you’re not an artist, then in today’s age that likely means you lean further into the consumer status. This isn’t inherently negative, and candidly it’s near impossible to be a producer today, with the mandate of technocrats changing our economy to be one that uses attention as its currency. Even a day of honest work is undercut by a few hours of mindless scrolling. Every minute of watched content on the internet took an exponential amount more of resources to produce, it's a net loss.
Consumers make up a majority of our world today, and not without good reason. It’s cheaper than ever to consume, and your pathway now lives in your pocket. Not to mention, these pathways a fucking addictive. It’s easier to quit smoking than delete social media, you can quote me on that.
So when the medium is so easy to digest, the default is to dive deeper into it. Those who might've produced in their spare time now use that time to consume. Colored pencils are traded in for YouTube, paint for Instagram, and the comparison continues.
In an era of out-of-practice-producers-turned-consumers, the motivation to produce is almost non-existent. We’ve left that part of us to influencers, content-creators, and media personalities. If it doesn’t garner attention, then there’s no point in it existing.
Ai art generators
What if I told you people still desired to create? They desire to scribble on pages, doodle in margins, sing songs in the shower.
What if I also told you they don’t remember how to anymore? That they’ve become lost at digital sea, in rough waves of shitty, needless content washing over them again and again? Drowning in apathetic blue light absorption.
Ai art generators remind people of something, the instinct to be creative. Sure, it may just be a whisper of creative impulse, but even if that push of a button is the faintest pulse of creativity, I’ll take it.
It’s hard to put in the time, effort, and money to become an artist, it’s not hard to have a machine learning model interpret centuries of artistry and spit out a probable combination of that info. In the matrix of work to reward, Ai art generators provide minimal reward, but save the user an exponentially higher amount of work for the same product.
The impending downfall
Let's remember the formula of the tech industry. Disrupt with new tech, get everyone acclimated to said new tech, jack up the prices, and rake in the cash until a new innovation enters the market.
Ai art generators are criminally unprofitable currently. The increase is impending, and once the true cost of this technology is revealed to the consumer, then we can ask what value this brings.
After all, Ai art is a probable combination of information that already exists, it lacks originality, a true measure of man in the arts.
So with the elimination of accessibility to LLMs, does anything change? Those folks who had a creative impulse, do they miss it? Or go back to ignoring productive impulses?
I'm not sure, and candidly, there's far too much introspection in this piece. I literally just saw people AI-ing themselves into Shiz University from Wicked and thought "why?". There's a desire to be a part of that fantastical world, and there's nothing wrong with that.
But what if that desire actually motivated creation instead of probable amalgamation? What if you painted yourself into the world? made a set for a themed photoshoot? What if you expended some effort into joining this fictional university? Wouldn't you get more out of it?
Here's my challenge, when the impulse arises to use an AI art generator, draw what you want instead. Let it suck, let it not reflect the immediate result you wanted, and do it again.
And again, and again. What you might discover, is you get a little better each time.
Not only that, but you may find that your shitty little wizard drawing is more reflective of you than anything an ai art generator could produce. Why? because ai art generators don't know you, only you know your nuances. The little things the internet doesn't see, the things that feed your an artist.
Embrace those little quirks. Don't go running to what's comfortable. Be original, be bad, and instead of training a ai art generator to learn how to represent you, train yourself to be your own representation.
From one unestablished artist to another.
Nicholas Louis Turturro
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