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!

None of those are funny.

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?

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.

“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.

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.

Your definition on what constitutes putting "humanity" into a piece of art is completely arbitrary. Thus I, and any rational being, reject it.

If a human have a image in his head and put it on any media that's putting "humanity" into art. You can do it with AI, so the debate is closed for me.
I've had images in my head that, after a lot of work, I've been able to put into a bitmap. The accuracy in which you can translate the image is a matter of skill as with any art of trade. But it can certainly be done with great accuracy using AI tools.

So there's no rational argument to say that AI art cannot have "humanity". Unless you start talking about "souls" or something like that.

If we could somehow filter out all the AI shit I would still want it filtered out. Even if it was "verifiably" better than humans.

Automated art is extremely depressing. Generative AI seeks to dehumanize and invalidate human expression.

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.

So, not all art is communicating heartfelt emotion. Is your opposition limited to the encroachment of AI into the space of emotionally communicative art?

What if someone is making art (or maybe you want to use another word) purely for money? Or depraved tentacle porn? If someone is just trying to create a funny comic, is that necessarily art or might it just be a means to the end of getting people to laugh?

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.

Photography completely displaced the segment of visual art whose primary goal was to accurately (what we might now call "photorealistically") reproduce what could be seen, because it was a better tool for that goal. If you pay a painter for a portrait today, it's because you want to see the brush-strokes, not because you want the most accurate rendition of your face possible.

I don't think the displacement of the former kind of portrait painter by photographers is in any way a problem with photography. It was a problem for portrait painters, so I can understand the distress of people who are producing art at risk of being displaced by AI.

So how is it that use of AI is "selfishly invading" but photography was not?

“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.

It’s not arbitrary, you just don’t understand it.

I’ve mentioned that using tools is not the end of the world, but slapping together boring prompts that yield stolen, poorly executed jokes is not art. Having AI rip-off other artists it found on the internet is not art. Asking it to write an entire song for you is not art. Most any other time where it’s a tool it’s just a complex algorithm and not really “AI” and it needs to be guided. Being a guide may or may not make someone much of an artist, depending on context.

The pursuit of art is worth more than the end result and I’ll be honest that I have no idea how to explain that to you if you still don’t get it.

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?

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.

Is your opposition limited to the encroachment of AI into ...

My opposition is to demon tech produced by vampires.

If someone is just trying to create a funny comic, is that necessarily art

Yes. Why would you even ask me this.

Depraved tentacle porn is art. —Why are you trying to like debate trick me into recoiling in disgust at what some people spend their time on?

Photography completely displaced the segment of ...

None of this is disagreeable, so... uh huh, yup, mhm.

So how is it that use of AI is "selfishly invading" but photography was not?

I'm gonna quote myself here:

Me:
there is hardly confusion about whether something is or is not a photograph.

If it were possible to tell, at a glance, whether something was or was not AI, it would not be causing nearly the social harm that it does. People couldn't cheat on their essay homework. People couldn't cheat in art competitions. Any game which used it, you could say "Ah, they took a shortcut there." Video evidence of a crime could still be trusted.

I mean, there are still big problems with the technology, but being able to tell is like the minimum requirement. I can't appreciate someone's brush strokes if there is no way of knowing a brush was struck. It's socially poisonous.

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.

The paradigm shift toward stupid monthly paying users?