Neither I, nor anyone, can "protect" it or slow it down. You either find a way to work with what's happening or spiral into greater and greater impotent rage. Better accept this now than slowly go mad no?

Despite their size, steam engines do not typically disrupt my workflow.

Sure, but I expect they disrupted the workflow of folks in 1804...

I wasn't asking you because you know it is inevitable.

I was asking the other user because I do not see what can be done against this genie that is out of the bottle. Just abandoning is never going to happen and regulating isn't going to fix all the qualms they have with it.

"Computers make people stupider" have also been a known fact when personal computers became common.

Computers are making us stupid

So stupid that people now reckon PCs are our friends

(www.theregister.com)

I'm sure we can trace back "new thing makes people stupider" arguments back to Aristóteles. It's a common human trope.

Unless AI became sentient and do things by itself, AI art still have humanity behind it. You not liking the tool the human used for making the art does not invalidate the humanity of the person who used that tool.

If like me going back a couple of centuries and saying that a photograph was not made by a human, but by a soulless machine. And that anyone who enjoys or makes photography is missing their humanity.

You cannot invalidate someone's humanity. That's against human rights or something.

You should go face to face with a person who made some image they like and love and put a lot of effort into it using AI tools, and say to them, face to face and looking them in the eyes "I do not consider you a human being".

Same as people needed to travel and know other cultures to cure racism. The butlerian yihad needs to meet different people to cure something that's quickly turning into bigotry.

People said the metaverse was inevitable. Bitcoin was at one time inevitable.

Frankly, I think more impotent rage is needed.

Are you positive they haven't? Or are you just balking at the idea that skills your grandfather had are fully lost on you.

Not going to school might make a population stupider. What happens when "using the computer" is kind of like "not going to school"?

Photographers choose where to point their camera. I've used AI generators, they're like the antithesis of choice. You can't learn to speak the language of visual mediums if you just let the robot speak it for you.

and say to them, face to face and looking them in the eyes "I do not consider you a human being".

Is this a challenge? I can knock it out by Friday.

For real though, these people are human beings—of course they are. But they're removing themselves from their own projects. I want to see more of them in their own work. That's the whole reason I'm even here; I can generate my own monkey throwing a banana, why would I need to see theirs?

I know people who takes hours in comfyUI making a workflow, tweaking aspects, choosing different nodes, adding several layers of different diffusion models.

You can use an AI generator just by making a prompt "make me a pretty giraffe" same I can take my phone a snap a quick picture. But same as a professional photographer can take hours chosing composition, camera configuration, then tweaking the result.. a person who want to make a good AI image can take hours or days improving and tweaking the workflow.

For instance, this is a workflow example, a easy one, not even the most complex I've seen:

That could take a long time to make, because the person had a specific vision on what they want the tool to produce, and can really steer it into producing exactly what they want.

I think a lot of hate, as always, come mostly from ignorance. Once you know the time and effort that someone can put into this, it's harder to discredit them.

I asked deepseek that question and it replied:

The computer got kicked out of the finger-counting contest because it started counting from zero!

Critical thinking is the important part. Being able to criticize thought and results of thing.

a person who want to make a good AI image can take hours or days improving and tweaking the workflow.

No, no, you're confusing effort with meaning. This is a literacy problem: I venture to guess you don't even understand the distinction I'm drawing.

The most complicated comfyUI-whatever is worth less to me than a child's drawing of their parents because the child's drawing is communicating love while the generated one is communicating nothing.

I am being a tinge hyperbolic here, but I have yet to see anything made by AI-hornies that was worthy of discussion. The lot of them can't even explain their own work—at best they can explain their comfyUI workflow because that's the thing they actually put effort into.

If you want AI art to be taken seriously, you must understand what art is.

You must stop selfishly invading the space other artists inhabit: photography was a paradigm shift, yeah, but it still left room for painters to do their own thing. In the modern day, there is hardly confusion about whether something is or is not a photograph.

You must stop pretending that spectacle is all art aspires to be. So many people complain that they can't be artists because they can't draw a professional character portrait—who asked you? Who asked you to do that? Does Minecraft, one of the most beloved games of all time, care that its block textures are all 16x16 color smudges?

One of my favorite youtube channels, Any Austin, has a series where he finds and appreciates the odd, forgotten, unremarkable places in games that players often overlook. Liminal spaces that exist just to fill out the map. A valley between a mountain and a cliff that has nothing in it. The canopy above a forest hallway you'd normally only ever see once because a fast travel point exists just beyond it.

Now, nobody minds that Minecraft is procedurally generated: this is an algorithm in art. But you know what you can't do in Minecraft? Talk about its liminal spaces. Any spaces like this that it might have can't be shared unless someone has your world seed, and any questions you might have all have the same answer: "The algorithm just did it like that. I don't know." There is no story told in these walls.

This doesn't mean that Minecraft is bad. This doesn't mean Minecraft shouldn't be procedurally generated. But something is lost here.

You must understand this if you want to be taken seriously.

The link you posted is saying exactly what the problem actually, demonstrably is. In fact it's hard to believe the page was written 25 years ago and not today, how perfectly it predicted the reality.
Did you even read it, or did you ask a computer to summarise the headline for you?

“That’s against human rights or something” wow, real strong comeback, bud. For “art” created just using prompts I don’t consider that to have any real humanity but the person is still a person. I did not say otherwise.

I use Heroforge to make extremely high quality D&D minis and make use of the kitbashing feature to do even more custom shit. Even still I understand the difference between that program and pure 3D modelling and don’t go around telling people I’m a 3D modelling artist(I am, somewhat, but that’s using SketchUp and I design buildings). I also know artists who write scripts and do motion capture but have AI programs layer faces on top of that but they still did the lion’s share of the work. Entering in prompts is so many levels below any kind of true art, assisted or not, that it just frankly shouldn’t be considered as such. There needs to be a human element, and when there isn’t it’s hollow and gross.

If someone brought an AI musician to the weekly jam we’d say “cool, but we’re here to play with human beings right now.” If they told us they were a musican “just using tools” that would be a whole other level of insulting, too. The human element is important, especially if all AI is doing is stealing material off the internet anyway. Have you ever seen one of those movies where they try to create life and despite having all the parts there’s just no spark?

“AI” is being used in place of people’s humanity(that they do have, but are not putting into this “art”) and that’s fucked up.

I propose you eat less hype about the slop generators. AI doesn't exist, and there is no reason to believe that we're closer to understanding if it's even possible. Machine learning algorithms have their uses and are used already a lot, and nobody is against that, but that's not AI. LLMs being pushed everywhere, and it's never useful or particularly liked, and that's not AI either. My hunch is that this bubble will pop, leaving an unpleasant odour behind, which we will have to deal with for years after, and then tech bros will come up with a new bullshit that revolutionises the world and disrupts the universe, because there is no meritocracy and the world is stupid.

gpt-4.1-2025-04-14

Why did the finger-counting contest end in a tie?
Because everyone could only count on themselves!

Why did the mathematician lose the finger-counting contest?
Because he kept trying to carry the one!

gemini-2.5-pro

I was judging a finger-counting contest, and it was incredibly close.
On the one hand, the defending champion was flawless... but on the other hand, so was he.

Why did the T-Rex get disqualified from the finger-counting contest?
Because he kept coming up short

deepseek-r1-0528

Here's one for you:
Why was Yubaba (from Spirited Away) disqualified from the finger-counting contest?
Because she kept adding ten more fingers halfway through!
(For context: Yubaba is a witch who magically grows extra hands with 10 fingers each when counting money. She'd definitely have an unfair advantage! )

Here's a fresh one for you:
Why did the concert pianist lose the finger-counting contest?
Because they kept insisting that a "perfect 10" should involve scales!
(Alternatively, playing on the unexpected twist...)
Why did the robot win the finger-counting contest?
Because it kept saying, "This is too easy—I'm counting in binary!"
Hope that gives you a chuckle!

Critical thinking is work, though. If the computer can skip the thinking for you, when does it happen?

Being used as a genuine tool, especially after it stops hallucinating, is fine to a point. We’re already finding that an over-reliance on LLMs and shit is causing issues for people, especially those with developing brains.

What I would use it for is to, eventually, use it to help expand tool libraries in programs or take away tasks that are ultimately just pure labour. I work in architecture(architectural technologist) and being able to use it to help draw plans(not design them for me, just draw them, would be awesome if it could understand proper layer usage, block usage and organization, and all those details. We’re nowhere near that right now, of course, and I would never want to hear myself saying “computer, design a building for me”.

I want to liken it to synchros in a manual transmission, or having ABS. I have full control over my vehicle still and it will never walk away from me just because my foot’s not on the brake pedal but it’s also not a huge fucking pain in the ass to drive because of double clutching. I’m still rev matching to change gears and everything, but there is forgiveness. I still support automatic transmissions for people who physically cannot drive stick but frankly at that point I have to ask why their neighbourhood in so underserved by public transportation.

Do you do anything creative? Like play music or make art? Have you ever noticed a skill within that taking a hit because of access to a new tool? I sure have, and am justifiably worried that when that tool becomes too powerful, especially too quickly, that too many of those skills will go unpracticed. With how people are using it even right now you can see very clearly that no one even has the curiousity to understand the help they’re getting.

AI should be a tool that helps humanity. If all we end doing is letting it take our humanity away then what on earth is the fucking point? Congrats, our meat is alive and uncreative, never being able to truly say “I did that”, just watching some computer make things for them.