AI art has become a controversy across social media. Most professional artists are upset by it, while many others like to use it to make memes, thumbnails or simply have fun. With the new Chinese company DeepSeek entering the chat, it’s ignited the discussion again. A main problem with AI art, however, is the quality and consistency. Artist Manuel Guzman believes it will never attain the level of real art because of the soul an artist puts into it.
He posted to a thread on X, saying,
It can be very disheartening when I see writers and musicians, especially folks I've worked with, or that are in the same spheres of social media , that use A.I. for image creation. These people are typically aware of the issue of mainstream industries being a problematic engine to society and culture.
They understand that depravity is being pushed on us in all forms of entertainment and they fight back by creating works that buttresses the good in culture. However, by resorting to using such software to generate the images for their... products, such as book covers and other promotional material, they are instead reducing the impact their work can have. By not dealing with human artists you might save on costs, but the price society, and the culture at large, pays is significantly greater in the long term.
Living souls respond to living art. Like the writers and the musicians, the visual artists are the children who dreamt that their input could bring delight and awe to the world. Those hopes and dreams push them through years of sweat and tears of hard practice. Those growing pains are at the heart of what make the art valuable and alive, beyond the aesthetic dimension. There is a story there. Today, the automated process by input prompts into the machine is actually a stealing the hard work of real artist and destroying those dreams.
The opportunity to build connection between persons, and for a stories to spawn that add volume to your projects, is sacrificed and wasted to punching cold and dry prompts into some software. So if you are considering using AI for your next project, reach out to some of the artists in your circles and you’ll be surprised to find that they are often willing to work something out where things are doable for everyone involved.
Art should remain the domain of living souls and I agree completely with the late Hayao Miyazaki of Studio Ghibli when he said, “I strongly feel that this is an insult to life itself.” I have been working as freelance artist for 20 years now and it’s as tough as it’s ever been. I just launched a campaign for my new project, LOLO’S ART BOOK, a collection of over 150 of my works from these past two decades. Check it out, back the project and support living art.
Despite his distaste for AI art, Guzman followed up with the post to say he’s not completely opposed to AI art in some instances, saying, “PS: I should say, I am not entirely against using A.I. art for inspiration and formulating ideas. I am referring to its use for the final form of a project, when it has become a product. Then, in those cases I see a missed opportunity where life didn't happen.”
He has an art book out of fantasy art right now with his masterful work on full display for fans. You can get his book here.
I have very strong feelings about AI and how it's being used lately to make art, primarily because there is absolutely no proof or even anything behind it that says it was made by a real person.
We've already seen how this has scraped and taken away from previous artists work, their styles & techniques along with the time it takes to bring the creation they are trying to handle to life, there's none of that degree of anything that shows legitimate effort gone into the creation of that piece.
It needs a model to train on otherwise it can't function, at least with an original piece you want compiling whatever reference you can assemble along with your own interpretation and imagination to bring that creation to life and at least with the time you take to bring that to life, depending on how much effort you put in that proves that AI can never really live up to whatever a real artist is able to achieve.
Especially as this cancer is spreading itself really far and wide into different areas not just art, how it affects the work of writers and even musicians and performers in film and television is truly quite shocking not to mention insidious how so many people who are enthusiastically behind this want to see those people out of business and with nothing.
Currently as it stands look how much AI is over flooding social media, aside from the memes it's filling up different parts of the internet in areas that you wouldn't expect it to. Horribly made deepfakes & propaganda which can be quite hard to believe & how that can always be mistaken for something real is even more troubling.
Accompanied by how much people that will support this in really absurd ways, will always spit on and look down upon human creativity as a bygone concept & in the subject of art they will always use terrible excuses to justify their lack of skill or effort gone into what they make.
At least from looking at a painting from DaVinci or even Van Gogh, you can tell who made it and you can tell that it was made during a time that it's impossible to recreate. The lengths people will go to defend AI and say that it's easy only just shows how rotten to the core a majority of the AI Revolution is.
Artists vs. Technology is an ancient battle. The question is whether technology opens up art for more people or reduces the avaliablity of art. Frankly, no artist today doesn't benefit from the technology of the past 30 years and yet they resist the next innovation. It's akin to plato railing against the written word, scribes protesting the printing press, painters angry about photography, photographers frustrated with cellphone cameras, ect. etc. ad. nauseum.
More on Artists vs. AI and whether it results in more or less art in the world here: https://www.polymathicbeing.com/p/artists-vs-ai