c/ai-art-debate

3

matthew_owens9•36m ago

Hot take: My AI art failed hard at a local print show last weekend

I entered this piece I made in Midjourney into a small gallery show in Portland. The colors looked perfect on screen but printed totally muddy with weird artifacts in the shadows. A guy running the print booth pointed out the AI upscaled it weird and I never checked the actual pixel level. Now I gotta figure out if I can fix it or if the file is just garbage. Anyone else had prints come out looking nothing like the digital version?

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danielmartinez•7h ago

Overheard a guy at the coffee shop trashing AI art and it made me flip

He said every AI piece is just a copy of someone else's style, but then I saw this piece called 'Electric Sheep' that used a custom dataset of the artist's own paintings. I think that changed my mind because it was clearly their vision, not just a stolen image.

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loganhart•1d ago

Hit 5000 AI generations last night and it finally clicked for me

I've been making AI art for about 8 months now and always said it wasn't real art because the computer does all the work. Last night I hit generation number 5000 on my account and decided to scroll back through my first 100 images. The difference was massive, my early stuff looked like a 5 year old's doodle compared to what I'm making now. I realized that it took me 5000 tries to get good at this, same as any traditional artist putting in hours at the easel. Does hitting a certain number of reps ever change how you see your own work?

15

olivia_chen35•1d ago

Spent 6 months tweaking prompts wrong before a Reddit comment tipped me off

I was always adding 'photorealistic' and '8K' to every prompt thinking that made the AI work harder. Then someone posted a comparison showing those words actually make it ignore composition and lighting details. Tried removing them and my character portraits suddenly had actual depth instead of that plastic look. Anybody else fall for the same trap or have other useless keywords to dump?

8

cameron_chen63•2d ago

Ran a side-by-side test of Midjourney vs DALL-E for a fantasy landscape prompt

I asked both to make a "haunted castle on a cliff at sunset" with the same exact prompt words. Midjourney gave me this moody, painterly look with actual fog and torch light that felt like a real painting. DALL-E gave me something that looked like a video game screenshot from 2010. I showed them to my art group and 8 out of 10 people picked the Midjourney one without knowing which was which. Has anyone else noticed certain AI tools are just better at specific styles?

21

james672•3d ago

Stumbled into a gallery in Austin that was all AI art, and the sales lady got mad at me

I was just killing time downtown Austin after a job and walked into this small gallery. Every single painting was AI generated, like those hyper real portrait ones with weird fingers. The sales lady started giving me this whole speech about how it's a new renaissance or whatever, but I couldn't stop staring at a picture of a cat that had six toes on one paw. She asked if I was interested and I said nah, I can make that in 20 seconds for free, and she literally asked me to leave. Has anyone else had a gallery person get defensive when you point out the obvious flaws?

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matthewperry•4d ago

I finally showed my dad an AI generated landscape last week

He's been a photographer for 40 years and I was nervous to bring up AI art at all. He stared at the picture of a mountain with bioluminescent trees for a solid minute then said "the light on the moss doesn't feel like real light." Made me wonder if AI art will ever fool people who know the real thing inside and out?

22

kim.wren•6d ago

Ran into a digital painter at a gallery in Portland who said AI art is 'soulless pixels'

I was at this small gallery opening in the pearl district last saturday, looking at these oil paintings of forests. This guy next to me starts going off about how AI art is just stealing from real artists and has no soul. I asked him if he'd ever actually used an AI tool himself, and he said no because it's 'cheating.' But here's the thing - I spend 20 hours on a single prompt sometimes, tweaking weights and blending outputs. He was acting like I just click a button. I didn't push back too hard cause it was a nice gallery, but it stuck with me. Has anyone else had a real artist tell you your work is fake to your face?

3

barbara399•9d ago

Noticed a shift after an AI art show in Brooklyn last month

I went to this gallery in Brooklyn where they showed AI generated portraits alongside human paintings. Something felt off about how people talked about the AI pieces, calling them "art" real quick without asking who trained the model or what data was used. The show had maybe 30 pieces and 12 of them were straight up copyrighted cartoon characters with filters. Does that bug anyone else when AI art gets called original?

3

schmidt.grant•9d ago

That one time a guy on here said AI art would kill the tattoo industry

Remember when u/ink_dad45 said AI generators would put tattoo artists out of business by 2026? I showed his post to my tattoo guy last month and he laughed, then showed me 4 clients that week who brought in Midjourney designs for him to redraw. Has anyone else seen AI actually helping traditional artists get more work?

8

quinn_nguyen•10d ago

Had to choose between Midjourney and DALL-E for a client project

I went with DALL-E for the better text rendering, but the composition was so stiff I had to spend 3 hours fixing the hands in Photoshop. Did I just pick the wrong tool for the job?

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sarahsullivan•11d ago

A/B tested Midjourney vs DALL-E for a week straight - one was way better for character art

So I had this project where I needed to generate a bunch of fantasy character portraits for a D&D campaign I'm running. I spent about 3 days trying to get consistent faces and outfits out of Midjourney v6, but every prompt felt like a dice roll. Then I switched to DALL-E 3 through ChatGPT for comparison. Honestly, the difference was huge. DALL-E just nailed the exact poses and expressions I described without me having to re-roll 50 times. Midjourney gave me cooler textures and lighting, but for specific characters with matching outfits across multiple images, DALL-E won easily. I think it comes down to how each model handles prompts - DALL-E seems to actually follow your instructions instead of interpreting them as vague suggestions. Has anyone else found one model way better for character consistency than the other?

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lisa_murray•12d ago

Wasted $50 on an AI art subscription and got nothing but garbage

I signed up for this AI image generator last month, paid $50 for the premium tier thinking I'd make some cool prints to sell at the local craft fair. All it gave me were weird hands with six fingers and backgrounds that looked like melted crayons. I spent three hours trying to get one decent picture of a cat sitting on a fence and it kept giving me a dog floating in space. Did anyone else get burned by one of these paid AI tools, or did I just pick the wrong one?

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wendy674•13d ago

Spent 3 hours fixing AI hands in my latest piece and still ended up with a thumb that bends backwards

I ran into a problem with a generated image of a woman holding a coffee cup where Midjourney gave her six fingers on one hand and a thumb joint that curved the wrong way, and after trying inpainting, manual Photoshop edits, and a second generation pass I finally just cropped the shot to hide the hand entirely has anyone else just given up and framed around the messed up bits?

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ninas70•13d ago

Stumbled on a trick for fixing AI hands using a double pass in Stable Diffusion

About 3 weeks ago at 2am after my shift I tried running the same prompt through img2img with a hand-focused mask at 0.4 denoising and it actually gave me fingers that look like fingers instead of spaghetti, anyone else found a workaround that works better?

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eric_ramirez67•15d ago

Finally saw the difference between Midjourney and Stable Diffusion side by side

I ran the same prompt through both last night, a simple landscape with a red barn and hills. Midjourney gave me something that looked like a Bob Ross painting right out of the gate, while Stable Diffusion needed about 15 tries and some tweaking to even look passable. But after that 15th try, I actually liked the Stable Diffusion version more because it had this gritty realism that Midjourney's version was too smooth. Has anyone else found one tool works way better for your style than the other?

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uma_reed26•17d ago

My first AI art piece came out looking like a melted Picasso

I was messing around with Stable Diffusion on my laptop around 2 AM and tried to generate a simple landscape but the prompt got garbled somehow and it spat out a tree that looked like it was crying into a river that flowed upward. Has anyone else had a total fail that actually made you stop and question if the glitch itself counts as art?

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gonzalez.anna•18d ago

Warning: My 5-hour AI render got corrupted by a single bad tag

I spent Sunday afternoon generating a huge batch of fantasy landscapes in Stable Diffusion (you know, for a client mood board), but one stray "ugly" tag in my prompt wrecked the entire output folder. Has anyone else had their whole batch ruined by one dumb keyword sneaking in there?

7

david821•21d ago

My friend's AI portrait made me think about the 'no effort' argument differently

I used to say AI art wasn't real because it took no effort. Then my friend, who can't draw a straight line, made a portrait of his late dog using an AI tool. He spent over a week typing in hundreds of different prompts, mixing parts of other images, and tweaking small details like the color of the collar. He showed me the 50 failed versions before he got it right. The final picture made him cry. How can you look at that and say there was no human effort or feeling in it? The tool did the drawing, but he did the hard work of guiding it with his memories. It's not the same as picking up a brush, but it's not nothing either. Has anyone else seen an AI image where the story behind it changed their mind?

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lisa_jones21•23d ago

I was cleaning out my old hard drive and found some AI images I made back in 2021.

I compared a landscape I made with Midjourney version 2 to one I made last week with version 6. The old one had weird, melted-looking trees and the water was just a blurry mess. The new one is so detailed and coherent it looks like a photo from a hiking trip in Colorado. It really made me think, if the tool keeps getting this much better this fast, how can we say the output isn't art? Has anyone else had a moment like this that changed their mind?

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stellafisher•24d ago

Found out my favorite AI art piece was trained on 2.3 billion images

I was reading a tech blog article about Midjourney's training data last week. It said their model learned from a dataset with over 2.3 billion pictures. That number blew my mind, it's more than I'll see in my whole life. It made me think about how much human art is in that pile. Does using that many images make the AI's work more or less 'real' art?

5

ivan211•26d ago

My friend's kid called my AI landscape 'just a pretty picture' and it got me thinking...

I was showing off a Midjourney piece I made of a sunset over the Rockies at a barbecue last month. My buddy's son, maybe 12, looked at it and said, 'It's just a pretty picture... my computer can do that.' He didn't say it to be mean, he just didn't get why I was proud. That stuck with me because he's right, the computer did make it... but I still put in the hours of prompts and edits. Does the work behind the prompt count for anything, or is it all just the machine's output?

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finley939•28d ago

Spent $60 on a Midjourney subscription and it totally changed my view

Honestly, I used to think AI art was just a cheap trick. But after paying for a month of Midjourney and spending a weekend trying to get a perfect image of a cyberpunk diner, I saw how much skill it actually takes with the prompts. It's not just typing one word, it's a whole process of refining and guiding. Has anyone else had a project that made them switch sides on this?

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piper_green•28d ago

I spent 4 hours trying to get an AI to draw a simple, specific image of a dog with a red collar in a park, and it kept adding extra legs or weird trees.

Has anyone else had an AI completely fail to follow a basic prompt, making you question if it's really 'creating' anything at all?

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noahs82•29d ago

A friend told me my AI landscapes looked like 'soulless wallpaper' and it stung, but they were right.

They said every piece I posted here had perfect lighting and no story, just empty pretty scenes. I was only typing prompts like 'mountain lake at sunset, 8k, trending on ArtStation'. For the past three months, I've been adding specific, weird details to my prompts, like 'a forgotten boot by the shore' or 'a fence with one broken slat'. It forces the AI to make choices that feel less generic. The images are messier now, but people ask about them instead of just scrolling past. Has anyone else found that adding a single flawed element makes the work feel more real?