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.

2 comments

2 Comments

seth_green854h ago

The "Electric Sheep" artist actually trained their model on 12 years of their own work, which is a really different approach than most people think about when they hear "AI art." Most of the criticism I see online is aimed at people typing "famous painter style" into Midjourney, which I get. But there's a whole undercurrent of artists using AI the same way a photographer uses Photoshop to push their own vision further. The real issue nobody talks about is that the loudest critics haven't actually used the tools themselves to understand the workflow. It's like hating on electric guitars because you only heard one bad garage band play them.

jordan6533h ago

Seen this play out a hundred times in my shop when people argue about new tools versus traditional methods. The electric guitar comparison is dead on. I had a guy swear up and down that laser levels were cheating until he tried using a string level on a 50 foot commercial drop ceiling. The real trick with AI art is treating it like a power tool instead of a replacement for the artist. You still have to know what you want, set it up right, and do the finishing work by hand. Spend two hours curating your dataset and tweaking parameters versus typing a prompt in 20 seconds. The results speak for themselves.