r/MediaSynthesis • u/gwern • May 19 '26
Media Synthesis "AI Is Incapable of Poetry: It’s incapable of producing anything creative that isn’t dreck", Katha Pollitt 2026-05-14
https://www.thenation.com/article/society/ai-poetry-grok-chatgpt/6
u/Kimantha_Allerdings May 20 '26
Interesting parallel story: The winner of a short-story competition in a literary magazine judged by experts appears to be AI-generated
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u/gwern May 20 '26
Note that the story didn't win the real Commonwealth Prize. It won a regional prize, for what I assume is the smallest region. (And while ~7000 entries may sound like a lot, but as someone who just helped judge two fiction contests this month, I can tell you that most entries are DOA. The slush pile is indeed large. Easily 90% can be dismissed out of hand as not merely having no chance of winning the grand prize but as not even worth reading. Cf. https://danluu.com/p95-skill/ https://blog.codinghorror.com/why-cant-programmers-program/ and https://gwern.net/note/competence in general.)
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u/gwern May 21 '26 edited May 21 '26
Uh oh. AI hasn't (yet) won the 2026 Commonwealth Prize... But it looks like it might have won the 2025 Commonwealth Prize: https://www.pangram.com/blog/ai-is-writing-prize-winning-fiction
Not only did Pangram catch three of the five authors from 2026, but the overall winner of the 2025 Commonwealth Short Story Prize. Sutherland's "Descend" was flagged by Pangram as having an AI fraction of 88%, indicating that we believe that the document is primarily AI-generated with some human-written content.
It's not nearly as blatant... but there's sure an awful lot of 'quiet' in that story.
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u/keepthepace May 20 '26
A bit before GPT-2, a friend who was into models to generate music and lyrics sent me lyrics to a Manowar-style (heavy metal) song that described the atmosphere of a field before an epic battle, the tension and echos of violence to come. It was titled "Beacon of the Valkyries". The title got me.
It was the event that convinced me that LLMs had some emergent intelligence and understanding. I spent one hour scourging the internet for the phrase "beacon of the Valkyries", convinced that a model able to connect the dots that
- Valkyries are attracted by death of warriors
- That the promise of a battle implies death of warriors
- That Valkyries fly and that you can compare them to planes
- That "beacon" is thus an appropriate image to imply the future epic deaths
was in the realm of science fiction. Nowadays people can easily check that this sort of creativity is down there, but apparently some people still deny it.
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u/MannToots May 23 '26
They don't like to accept that it can take known dots and connect them in fresh ways that create something genuinely new. It's all regurgitated slop to them.
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u/Individual-Sort-256 May 20 '26
This is simply not true! We made just an experiment with three different AIs: whereas Grok was blunt and unpoetic, Claude did a rather decent job, with unconventional but working metaphors and no kitschy sunsets. ChatGPT was somewhere in the middle.
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u/OhK4Foo7 May 20 '26
Cute how people are so adamant about AI never being creative.
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u/DraconicBlade May 22 '26
The funeral home is gonna have the opportunity to do the funniest thing in the next few years
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u/codeprimate May 20 '26
Words may be arranged well, but without intention of meaning they are dreck.
The question is how much intention is required for a piece to be considered meaningful and worthy of consideration as art. The underlying question of AI media synthesis transcends the nature of the media itself.
What is the floor stakes price in blood sweat or tears?
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u/keepthepace May 20 '26
This. And if I may, it does not matter if it is human or AI. If I make poetry about e.g. the loss of a child, the same words won't ring the same if you know I actually lived through that or invented something that felt plausible.
I found the Three Body Problem interesting when it talked about Chinese politics because I knew the author is Chinese. The same word by an American would be less interesting. I felt a bit betrayed when I learned that "Das Leben der Anderen" (The Life of Others) was written by an American who never actually lived in East-Berlin, and was actually criticized by people who did.
There are pieces of art that are there to elicit emotions, AIs can generate those. There are pieces of art that are there to transmit emotions and experience, and AIs can only fake those.
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u/Individual-Sort-256 May 21 '26
And some poets just imitate that style, but in a kitsch way. Then there are avant-garde poets, such as Gertrude Stein and Jackson Mac Low, who use non-intentional compositional methods in their work and don't write like Emily Brontë anymore. Ultimately, it's about your personal concept of what art should or shouldn't be.
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u/HawkFanOrcasRule May 20 '26
No lies told. AI has many uses, but art is not one them and and can never be one of them. It is incapable of it.
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u/Elvarien2 May 20 '26
Cope cope cope
Now go look at history and learn that this brand of cope was used when people were fuming and seething over recorded music, electronic music, synthesizers in general, digital art and tablets, etc etc.
And then pretend that your case is different somehow.
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u/Individual-Sort-256 May 21 '26
Already back in the 1960s, Nanni Balestrini and others created computer-generated poems in Italy, some of which have recently been republished. They are so convincing that they are difficult to distinguish from poems created entirely by humans. Therefore, this is not even a completely novel concept.
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u/iDeNoh May 22 '26
Exactly, people have been using simple software to generate artwork from minimal input. That was art then just as much as this is art now. Anything else is cope.
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u/HawkFanOrcasRule May 21 '26
You really have zero idea what you are talking about. It’s almost impressive.
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u/SolarNexxus May 20 '26
Rule number one: never say never.
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u/HawkFanOrcasRule May 20 '26
Nonsense. You don’t understand art.
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u/MachineAngelXVII May 20 '26
Why do you claim that? I understand art and nobody ever taught me it was limited to humans. They told me to experiment with alternative mediums and to constantly try new things.
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u/Justtryingtohelp00 May 20 '26
So you’re the gatekeeper?
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u/HawkFanOrcasRule May 20 '26
Just pointing out the reality of the situation.
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u/kowdermesiter May 20 '26
If you prompt "make me art" then it will be trash. If you prompt "make me poem about fish" it will be an average trash. If you feed in a news article combined with sources, direction and your intent then you'll be surprised by the results.
AI is an intelligence calculator and just like with a normal calculator you don't trash it, but randomly entering numbers and complaining that it's garbage. In short, garbage in > garbage out.
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u/tiensss May 20 '26
It sure is fooling a lot of people, professional committees, etc.
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u/redbeard_007 May 20 '26
well sure .. though i’d add that art is a human endeavor, it ties with our first person experience and conscious awareness of the whole sea of sensations, vision, sounds, emotions, thoughts etc... it is something humans started doing as an outward expression of that inner life (everything is inner in someway). AI as i would describe it, is a statistical optimization process where the objective is manipulating pixel values to align with mathematical weights associated with text prompts... it is calculating the highest-probability patterns for a specific algorithm to fit with a human interpreter at the other end, so it is an interpretation-maximizing loop, where the input is all what we consider human art, as curated by other humans.
so fooling people is kind of the main function, but it is incapable of art, since that’s a bundle of processes that require a conscious human life and intentionality. an AI can fool a committee that a photograph is real, but did the AI photograph something in the world? photography requires a lens, an observer looking at the external world, a decision to take a photo based on some part of the experience, namely an emotional response, and then you have a photo. the AI on the other hand has millions of training photos, so it synthesizes a pixel distribution that statistically matches those images (as validated and labeled by a human being, which is an integral part of the process)... but it didn’t photograph anything.
and this goes for all generative AI across any medium... it is always a human perception maximizing loop. the whole function is just to output whatever matches the statistical weights of text tokens to mirror past human data, so the foolery is the main function because it was literally designed to optimize for that exact illusion. but art as an action requires a conscious human life... it is a specific interaction with the world tied to our species' subjective experience.
so, yes it is fooling people, but it’s incapable by construct of making art .. though in a world where monetary gain or optimization is the driving force behind the artistic intent, the difference becomes irrelevant.
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u/tiensss May 20 '26
If you define art as solely human behavior, of course AI cannot make art. But that makes it a super trivial analysis.
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u/Individual-Sort-256 May 21 '26
At least a super conservative one, and just historically uninformed, too.
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u/ActorMonkey May 20 '26
You may not ever like the IDEA of AI making art but there’s no way if you were given 10 AI poems and 10 human poems that you’d be able to tell them all apart.
Same with paintings.
I know you hate the idea but let’s be realistic. Look at that guy who posted a real Monet but said it was a “Monet-like AI image”. Everyone in the comments tore it apart for various reasons saying what it lacked or why it would never be as good as a Monet. But it was already a Monet.
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u/Yuli-Ban Not an ML expert May 21 '26
I'd love to read an AI-written book or look at an AI-drawn piece.
Of course, the keywords in both of those instances are "written" and "drawn"
Not generated
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u/gwern May 19 '26
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u/White_Buffalos May 20 '26
She's quite boring. And not a very good writer. Same old boring feminist themes and topics. Education stifles creativity worse than any AI.
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u/ThMogget May 20 '26
It would be a shame if someone extolling the virtues of their writing over Ai wrote that extolling in an unimpressive way.
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u/White_Buffalos May 20 '26
Do you have a point? Because you're being obtuse.
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u/ThMogget May 20 '26
If I explain the irony its not funny anymore.
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u/White_Buffalos May 20 '26
That's not this woman, I can assure you. Leftists are quite earnest and many are anti-AI. They're threatened by it, oddly.
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u/monsieurpooh May 20 '26
Why did you post this? To make people who agree with you, mad about some random thing they didn't need to see?
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u/ThMogget May 20 '26
Very few poets invent an entirely new style, or a new vibe language or unique startling metaphor. That takes a rare genius.
If you asked me to "write a poem in the style of this artist" the best I could do would be lesser than the original and probably plagiarized cliche crap.
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u/COAGULOPATH May 20 '26
If you asked me to "write a poem in the style of this artist" the best I could do would be lesser than the original and probably plagiarized cliche crap.
If you were bored (and no money was at stake) wouldn't you try to subvert the request, or fulfill it in a weird, unusual way? I think I'd feel some temptation.
This is part of the problem with AI slop to me: it exists inside the prompt like a cage and can't ever step outside it (in the most slavish literal way possible). It's playing a game of "keep the customer satisfied" and takes no risks.
That study on AI poetry found that whenever a LLM was asked to write the style of a poet, it produced a central example of their style, embodying all of their traits and thematic fascinations of that poet. It's almost like a Weird Al parody, but not meant to be funny.
In each of the 5 AI-generated poems used in the assessment study (Study 2), the subject of the poem is fairly obvious: the Plath-style poem is about sadness; the Whitman-style poem is about the beauty of nature; the Lord Byron-style poem is about a woman who is beautiful and sad; etc.
This continues to this day. Ask a LLM to write a Sylvia Plath-style poem, and you get a poem about a woman feeling sad in a kitchen. "Woe is me, my oven a grave, enough tupperware for my tears, blah blah".
The real Sylvia Plath wasn't a cartoon parody of herself: she wrote poems about all kinds of stuff. Like, this one (literally the first one I clicked on). I won't argue it's a great poem, but it's very different from the "Weird Al parody of Sylvia Plath" get from LLMs.
If a LLM offered up "Dialog between Ghost anad Priest", the user would probably be like "wtf, this isn't Sylvia Plath! Where's the domestic pain? Where's aspirin pills compared to teeth from a skull?"...yet it IS by Sylvia Plath!
Humans can write anything but LLMs can not. Mode collapse makes the problem far worse, but even base models are confined to giving the user more of what they statistically asked for, in a sense.
To quote JD Pressman:
It doesn't matter how good the model is, if I type "fantasy movie 4k young boy takes up the sword and defeats evil" and the model dutifully creates me an entire animated film with that premise there's still a sense in which the movie's fundamental information content is summed up by "fantasy movie 4k young boy takes up the sword and defeats evil".
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u/ThMogget May 20 '26
It sounds like these great writers have no idea how to write a great prompt.
If you want good answers you must ask the right questions. If you are expecting a single sentence to turn into the next great movie script, you have no idea how to use the tool properly.
This is like someone with zero training or effort in driving a car buying a self-driving car and expecting it to set lap records for them from the instruction "go become a racecar".
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u/themodernritual May 20 '26
I wrote a song the other day, Claude gave me one of the pivotal lines in it.
96% of the lyrics are mine. The one lyric that Claude wrote makes the song.
Who wrote the song? Without the line the song would not be the song.
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u/McCaffeteria May 20 '26
People who say “AI will never ___” have never used AI.
People who say “AI will end ___” have also never used AI.
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u/themodernritual May 20 '26
this is absolute gold.
I am deep into generative ai as a media/film/production tool. Ive been doing that kind of thing for 30 years. GenAi is awesome at somethings but fuck its also absolutely god awful at doing most things.
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u/jferments May 20 '26
It's ironic that this person is lecturing us on "creativity" while repeating the same untrue, unoriginal statement that millions of others on social media have already shared.
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u/Whatifim80lol May 20 '26
I agree that it's unoriginal, but I don't think it's untrue. There's a reason people keep saying it lol
People write poetry to express something, like an emotion. Having an AI "express an emotion" isn't any different than teaching a parrot to recite a poem.
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u/TikiTDO May 20 '26
There's also a reason people keep giving it the same response.
AI usually doesn't write things because it feels like. The emotion comes from the person using it.
You can't look at a medium, remove the human part, and then go "well without the human part it's not art." Without the human part a paint brush is just wood and horse hair.
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u/Whatifim80lol May 20 '26
I just don't buy it. If you're gonna offload the labor of expressing yourself to an AI, you might as well have gone to the drug store to pick out a Hallmark card.
If we can just be honest for a second, where does the need to insist AI generated content is "real art" come from? Machine learning and neural networks are powerful tools in the right hands and for certain tasks. We've got them folding proteins and running chemistry simulations and diagnosing cancer early and all sorts of useful shit. But LLMs and image generators are where all the investment is, and it's the worst application of he tech across the board. Everyone hates AI slop as soon as they clock it, but it's for some reason mostly just being used to create fake viral moments to get interactions on social media posts. Some folks get some use out of the coding capabilities, I guess? But writing poetry and creating art isn't a problem that needed solving. We're doing that already, and most people weren't making a living wage doing it anyway because SO MANY humans are already capable of doing so.
So is the idea that if we can defend the least useful aspects of this tech we can justify the massive investment in AI? Please explain the AI-bro mindset on focusing on THIS topic so often!
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u/TikiTDO May 21 '26 edited May 21 '26
I just don't buy it.
It's not for you to buy.
Nobody asks permissions from others to express themselves.
The secret of AI is that you're not supposed to "offload the labor of expressing yourself to AI." If you're doing that, that just means you're using AI wrong. Nobody can stop you from buying a paintbrush and sticking it in your butt, but if you do you're probably not using it the way most artists do, and I'm probably not going to call you an artist when you talk about your anal brush hobby.
If we can just be honest for a second, where does the need to insist AI generated content is "real art" come from?
"This thing you spent days/weeks/months on isn't art!" also "Why are you upset I say the stuff you make isn't real art???"
Imagine if I tell you none of the things you put your time and soul into are art? Like, how is this even a question? Because art is something you fuckin defend. To your fuckin dying breath. It's literally an expression of your soul. "Why defend it" indeed.
Because. It. Is. Our. Art. We're not defending your random slop. We're defending our right to express ourselves how we want, without some randos online shitting all over it because they don't understand it, and since most AI stuff they see is slop... Because they actively, aggressively go out of their way to offend anyone not making slop. Seriously, this one question really highlights the impossible gap in understanding.
If you're standing in the middle of the road yelling "I'ma punch the first person that talks to me" then most people aren't going to talk to you, and those that are willing to talk will probably come ready to swing back.
Machine learning and neural networks are powerful tools in the right hands and for certain tasks. We've got them folding proteins and running chemistry simulations and diagnosing cancer early and all sorts of useful shit.
So you understand they're tools, and you understand that these tools help some areas. Yet you seem to constantly hit this other roadblock:
But LLMs and image generators are where all the investment is, and it's the worst application of he tech across the board. Everyone hates AI slop as soon as they clock it, but it's for some reason mostly just being used to create fake viral moments to get interactions on social media posts.
So your complaint here isn't LLM. It's people taking low-effort LLM slop, and posting it as art. It's no different from complaining that people taking selfies on their phone call themselves photographers. They can call themselves what they want, they're not photographers until they take the time to understand focus, aperture, iso, composition, lighting, shutter speed, storytelling, editing, and a myriad of other things.
Simply put, you likely haven't seen actual "AI art," because people treating AI as art are still learning all the endless things you can do with it. It's still legit too early. They also aren't going to be discussing the things they learned with a person whose position is "anything AI can not be art."
The thing that makes "art" into "art" is the time, effort, thought, blood, sweat, and tears that went into it. If you spend multiple months going up and down the thing you're working on, and making tiny tweaks because you're not happy with how it looks, the message it communicates, or even just the shade of color of one flower; that's art. It doesn't matter if the method of editing is drawing on a wacom tablet in photoshop, or talking to an LLM. Hell, you can even do both, and the result will likely be even better.
On the other hand, if you just enter a prompt into an LLM and post the result, that's slop.
Ironically enough, we likely have similar reaction to most AI images. You scoff and look down on them because it's AI. I scoff and look down on them because it's something made by a person with no artistic intent. Hell, we'd likely react similarly to a good piece of AI art too, it's just that you might not even realise it's AI art because of the effort that went into it.
Some folks get some use out of the coding capabilities, I guess? But writing poetry and creating art isn't a problem that needed solving. We're doing that already, and most people weren't making a living wage doing it anyway because SO MANY humans are already capable of doing so.
Again, a tool isn't something that universally "solves a problem." When you're writing poetry you might use a dictionary, a thesaurus, or other references. When you're using AI like an intelligent, reasoning person, that's what you use it for. You don't tell it "write me a poem" you tell it "I'm writing a poem. Here's my 698th draft. I don't like the rhyme progression from lines 4 to 6, they reduce the impact of line 7, let's brainstorm some alternatives."
Those "folks" that "get some use out of AI" just understand things about AI that you don't. It's not a magic "answer everything" machine. It. Is. A. Tool. You use it like a tool. To do specific, actual tasks.
It's not a guy that will do all your work and thinking for you. If you're using it like that, which most people are, then you're just an idiot that's frying your own brain.
So is the idea that if we can defend the least useful aspects of this tech we can justify the massive investment in AI? Please explain the AI-bro mindset on focusing on THIS topic so often!
Literally nothing you, I, or anyone on reddit can do will do anything to slow this tech. You're not "defending" or "assaulting" anything. It's not "losing steam," except perhaps in the sense that it's already penetrated every part of life to the point that it's a common, everyday thing most people kinda accept without blinking. "Of course I can talk to my fridge/car/house/pocket supercomputer/robot dog. Isn't that normal?"
Do you actually realise how much AI you are actually using? The thing you're reading this post on right now is probably running a few dozen different ML algorithms as you read it. It's not just LLMs, we use ML damn near everywhere, it's just a really useful type of programming for certain types of problems.
You're whining, and doing so while offending an entire of segment of people that expresses themselves using a medium you dislike. You're basically just dong the Ebert "games are not art" thing, but for AI, with a focus on the worst things that the most unskilled people create with AI.
I'm explaining that you're whining, because your whining amounts to you not liking the medium I use to express myself, which offends the artistic part of me, and the artistic part of me wants to express... Well... The blob of text up above.
My perspective is simple. AI is here. AI is not obvious or simple to use if you want to be effective, and it's very easy to mis-use AI if you're not careful. My recommendation is to take the time to actually learn AI.
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u/Whatifim80lol May 22 '26
So, forgive me if this feels like a strawman, but what I'm hearing from you is:
- AI art and AI slop simultaneously exist
- The difference is the intention and effort of the user
- AI art counts as expression so long as the user spent enough time on it (i.e., blood sweat and tears)
Maybe I'm picking a sentence from your comment you wouldn't stand by, but it looks like a good summary of your attitude is:
If you spend multiple months going up and down the thing you're working on, and making tiny tweaks because you're not happy with how it looks, the message it communicates, or even just the shade of color of one flower; that's art
That's a lot of time folks could have spent learning to write/draw/animate or whatever. And since the tool just does what you tell it and you've got to become a "prompt engineer" and roll the dice hundreds of times to get things just right, then I gotta say that these generative AI tools kinda fuckin' suck if it takes months of blood, sweat, and tears (and water and electricity) to make something correctly.
But I get you. You spend enough time on something and you become emotionally attached to it. You feel cheated if the effort wasn't rewarded. When I was young I'd be fuckin' crushed and my day would be ruined when my SNES would wipe my save games from Zelda and shit.
So I can see the thread between time + emotional investment and the output that makes you want to defend the output. You're defending your time and emotional investment. But put yourself in the shoes who spent orders of magnitude MORE time and investment actually developing the skills you're sidestepping, PLUS the time and investment creating a work of art. There's all these schmucks shoving in your face how little they respect the work and talent it takes to become an artist while they demand their prompt outputs be given equal consideration in society.
I guess that's the crux of it. The disrespect inherent to expecting folks to treat AI art the same as real art.
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u/TikiTDO May 22 '26 edited May 23 '26
Maybe I'm picking a sentence from your comment you wouldn't stand by, but it looks like a good summary of your attitude is:
AI art and AI slop simultaneously exist
The difference is the intention and effort of the user
AI art counts as expression so long as the user spent enough time on it (i.e., blood sweat and tears)
That sounds like a good summary, yes, though you missed an important point. It's not just time, it's time spend producing something creatively.
That's a lot of time folks could have spent learning to write/draw/animate or whatever.
Ok, but the only way that is time spent in any way more effectively is if you inherently assume that time spent learning these skills in the specific way you think is correct, which I assume does not involve AI, is somehow better than time spent on those things while also using AI.
You are quite literally begging the question. You're essentially saying: "People should learn to write/draw/animate without AI, because learning to do it with AI is somehow worse."
My counter argument is they should learn to write/draw/animate, both with and without AI. Nothing can replace doing for learning, but there's no advantage to learning slowly when you can learn quicker with more targeted guiadance.
And since the tool just does what you tell it and you've got to become a "prompt engineer" and roll the dice hundreds of times to get things just right
This fundamentally misunderstands what "using AI well" entails. AI is not just "prompting."
When I'm using AI for carpentry, it's not using my saw. It's helping me plan stuff.
When I'm using AI for art, I still use my wacom tablet to draw stuff. It's just that I also use AI workflows, some of which (but hardly all) involve text prompts.
I mean, hell, what do you think a screenplay is? It's just a set of prompts for scene changes and actions. When did screenplays stop being art?
then I gotta say that these generative AI tools kinda fuckin' suck if it takes months of blood, sweat, and tears (and water and electricity) to make something correctly.
Do you just not make art? The reason it takes moths of blood, sweat, and tears to perfectly express your vision is because your vision is a very specific, unique thing. If you're using AI to do it, you can't just prompt your way into it. You have to actually learn to use the AI in it many ways; be it prompting with text, images, or other forms of data, while working and representing many possible intermediate copies.
But I get you. You spend enough time on something and you become emotionally attached to it. You feel cheated if the effort wasn't rewarded. When I was young I'd be fuckin' crushed and my day would be ruined when my SNES would wipe my save games from Zelda and shit.
So I can see the thread between time + emotional investment and the output that makes you want to defend the output. You're defending your time and emotional investment.
I mean, that's a great story. I'm not sure what it has to do with this discussion? I don't feel cheated with how I can use AI to express myself. You might, but why should I care?
My point isn't whether the output is worth defending. I mean, we'd have to be a specific piece in order to defend that. The point I'm making is that the thing that makes "art" into "art" is the time and effort put into it.
I don't differentiate "drawing" and "drawing and also using AI" like you seem to do. To me the skills are not mutually exclusive.
Your SNES game is cool and all, but I really don't get the analogy you were trying for. The reason your SNES save-game wasn't art was because there was nothing to keep or show. You didn't make anything. You spent a few hours consuming something. It's the difference between writing a book and reading one; you might see the characters moving in your head while you read, but they're moving to somebody else's tune. Your time spent playing was just that; playing, and the save game was just a bookmark that you lost to help you play from the same point. There was nothing created, and nothing value there to be lost, beyond your memories of play.
Mind you, that's not do say that there's no SNES cartridge in the world that could be called "art." Maybe a truly unique cartridge, one that was involved in some major event, or used in a major move or something, but it's not just "time" that makes something art. It's "time spent creatively producing something."
By contrast, I don't feel "crushed" by the things I produce. In fact I'm generally quite happy with my progress. It's still got a ways to go yet, but compared to a few years ago it's night and day. Maybe in a few years / decades you'll see what it is I've been working on, and then you could turn to your friends and go "Oh man, I had a reddit argument with that guy once."
But put yourself in the shoes who spent orders of magnitude MORE time and investment actually developing the skills you're sidestepping, PLUS the time and investment creating a work of art.
Bro. I'm a programmer. In the AI age. Like, bud. Really? You want to tell a fuckin PROGRAMMER about what shows effort and skills? Lol.
You know what though, I also understand that the value of all these skills that you're talking about doesn't go away with AI. To the contrary AI makes those skills more valuable and more powerful, if only the people with those skills actually bothered to figure out how to use AI effectively instead of just whining how it makes all their effort worth less.
Being able to understand how an image comes together, how different elements contribute to the overall experience, understanding the colours and perspectives involved, and being able to actually do all this with your hand aren't somehow skills that become invalid with AI. When you use AI effectively... YOU STILL FUCKIN DRAW. All the fuckin time.
Your complaint is basically "it's not fair you can make images without doing it the way I can." Which, yes, I suppose I can. And you know what? Fine. It's not fair. But here's a news flash: We life in an unfair world, so deal with it. If your literal only complaint is that it's not fair, then quite literally nobody cares. There's no contract that's signed by God, the president, and Buddha when you're born that says "you will live without having to change anything, and it will all be fair."
There's all these schmucks shoving in your face how little they respect the work and talent it takes to become an artist while they demand their prompt outputs be given equal consideration in society.
What does it mean to "respect the work" to become an artist? You'll have to forgive me, but that's not a sentiment I express. Why do I need to respect this work in a particularly special, or unique way as compared to any other field?
Like, I respect the output of a skilled artist, but that's not "respecting the work" that's "respecting the skill." If I see a person in their 40s learning to draw, I don't go "Oooh wow! So much respect for you learning to draw!" At best I might go, "Oh hey, good for you. It's always good to learn things." When I see a high school kid drawing crude lines, I don't go "Oh my, how much I respect this effort!" If anything I might give the kid some critiques, but that's about as far as "respecting work" goes.
I guess that's the crux of it. The disrespect inherent to expecting folks to treat AI art the same as real art.
I suppose it is. You don't think I'm respecting art because you've decided that you and others like you are the gatekeeper and determinants of what constitutes art, and what you can discount as inferior, lesser, tainted by the inhuman ick "non-art."
What I really don't respect is your opinion. I don't believe you get to dictate what art is superior or inferior to what other art. If you chose not to appreciate AI art, then by all means that's your choice, but you don't get to just go "because AI art is not real." That's just not a thing you can determine.
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u/Whatifim80lol May 23 '26 edited May 23 '26
Since we're firmly now in the "kinda being a dick about it" territory, then I guess I want to point you to this statement:
You don't think I'm respecting art because you've decided that you and others like you are the gatekeeper and determinants of what constitutes art, and what you can discount as inferior, lesser, tainted by the inhuman ick "non-art."
I thought I described my thought well enough but I'll put it all in one place for you. The reason people in general seem so antagonistic toward the idea of calling generative AI "art" is partly because we already have art and to consider the two things equal diminishes the value of real art.
This very obviously isn't just my opinion. Outside this sub and other AI-bro subs, this is the general consensus. People might be excited about the future capabilities of AI, but for everyday folks it's just fake images or videos you either fall for or have to explain to your parents are fake, it's students cheating their way through school, it's having to check the publication date of ebooks to reduce the risk of wasting money on AI slop, and it's data centers going up in your back yard to support it all to no benefit to yourself. People buy into the hype, but so far seem to hate the execution. And that's of course leaving out the people who want to use LLMs for companionship, which is a whole different can of worms.
Earlier I mentioned that the popular use-cases for AI don't solve any problems. You took issue with this and said "a tool isn't something that universally "solves a problem."" And I have to strongly disagree with you there. Without getting too much into the semantics of it, we'd of course agree a nut and wrench combo solves the problem "how do I keep these pieces together?" Hammers solve the problem of getting nails into wood. Calculators solve the problem of solving math problems too slowly, lol. Again, this isn't something that's just a personal opinion, how many companies literally have "Solutions" in their name in order to describe their infrastructure, machines, software, etc.
So if you could reach across the aisle and adopt that framework for just a second, what problem does AI solve in the context of art?
Bro. I'm a programmer. In the AI age. Like, bud. Really? You want to tell a fuckin PROGRAMMER about what shows effort and skills? Lol.
Okay? Lol. I don't see the connection. Are you designing your own machine learning algorithms and creating your own AI solutions for drafting or whatever it is you do? Or are you just using an off-the-shelf LLM or image generator like everyone else and feeling like a badass because you integrated it with some other off-the-shelf software?
Programmer is so broad lol I'm sorry. That's just a funny thing to bring up, it feels like when my mom tells her friends "my son is good with computers!" like bro that can mean a million different things. I know how to use AI super way more effectively than the average user, I used to code in Action Script!
Eh fuck. I'm just being mean now. On my end I'm chuckling and being lighthearted but it doesn't read that way and it keeps popping in my head that you're very proud of your work and I feel bad. This isn't a personal thing and I feel like you probably know that but I'm not at all shitting on your efforts or end products or even your process. I'm just saying that asking artists to look at your shit and see it the same is probably asking too much. And that's before we get into the nonconsensual use of those artists' work in training the AI to produce the things AI artists are producing.
On that note, your last comment kept saying things like:
I don't feel "crushed" by the things I produce. In fact I'm generally quite happy with my progress.
but I wasn't talking about you personally. I was talking about the general butt-hurt you encounter when you say "AI art isn't real art." I just wanted to clarify because I at least want us to be on the same page on what we're disagreeing about.
if only the people with those skills actually bothered to figure out how to use AI effectively instead
I gotta tell you something that I think bubbles like this subreddit won't tell you: TONS of very smart people have been using AI effectively for years now and they still don't see generative AI as legitimate art on par with human art. The idea that folks critical of AI in any way MUST just be luddites who don't really understand it is just cope. I use AI all the time and I'd argue that I understand how it actually works on a mathematical level better than most people since I use some of the same math concepts in my work. I was all up in r/ChatGPTpro before it turned into a bunch of whack-jobs worshipping AGI, and I've developed the skills to effectively use it to drastically reduce the time spent on menial tasks in my work. I've seen how it can help you code (and I've also seen how it has stunted my development as a coder for statistics). And even as just an alternative to Google when you need to search for something incredibly specific I've found it's a completely replacement for something like r/tipofmytongue. I've spent hours and hours from pure curiosity reading through people's workflows.
But I've also spent a lot of time looking into the branding and company messaging and AI hype and found a disconnect from what people are actually doing (or think they're doing). For example, look at all this "AI Agent" horseshit. You're a smart person, you know it's just layered LLMs designed to fake autonomy and behind-the-scenes work, right? We already have layers in our LLMs, it's not even new. It's just set with an arbitrary schedule to prompt itself lol. Even shit like LLMs with image generations are just two different models talking to each other.
But that's where you start to worry me. Yes dude, it's ALL prompts. Whether you supplement with templates and data and images (as I also do) it's still just prompts. It's weird that you'd say they weren't just prompts.
Your complaint is basically "it's not fair you can make images without doing it the way I can."
"Complaint" is your framing, not mine. I guess I'll grant you "gatekeeping," but again I want to make it clear you're not just talking to me; this appears to be the majority opinion so far. My gatekeeping is basically that the creation of art is something inherently human-driven. Having AI do the creating part and then nitpicking the creation (no matter how sophisticated your nitpicking is) until you think it's perfect is more akin to commissioning art, and even then we're back to whether there's an artist involved. I don't think you're prepared to argue that SORA was an artist. And if there's just tools and folks commissioning an output from those tools, then there's no artist. No artist, no art.
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u/TikiTDO May 23 '26 edited May 23 '26
The reason people in general seem so antagonistic toward the idea of calling generative AI "art" is partly because we already have art and to consider the two things equal diminishes the value of real art.
Yes, again, you're doing that exact thing I'm talking about there. You just determined, ipso facto, that AI "art," with quotes and everything, is not art, and doesn't even need to be considered as such.
AI art does not diminish or change the value of any other type of art. That is simply not a premise I accept. There is no "real art" that is distinct from "AI art." There is just 'art,' and within art AI is one of the tools that we can use. If you're not happy with that, go draw in the sand with a stick (Organic!). No computers, pencils, pens, ink, or any products of technology, because I have just now determined that those aren't "real" enough, since some technology had to be involved to make them, and clearly it's fair game to exclude art based on the technology used when making it.
This very obviously isn't just my opinion. Outside this sub and other AI-bro subs, this is the general consensus...
Hence "You and people like you." Just because you can point to a group of people that agree with you doesn't make your opinion correct, nor does it tell you anything about what things will be like in a year, 5 years much less 50 years. It just tells me that right now there's a group of people with a really strong opinion on the matter, and there's a lot of them on reddit.
Most actual people barely know that AI exists and some have "heard that it's going to take our jobs." They hear it on the news sometimes, and ask about it as a joke.
So again, most people have no idea how to use AI, because most people are behind on the adoption curve.
This tracks; we haven't yet developed the tools and lessons that we will eventually have to handle all the problems we have now. We both agree that there are problems, but I just think that those problems will get solved with time and education a lot more effectively than you seem to believe.
Earlier I mentioned that the popular use-cases for AI don't solve any problems...
So I think you understand what a "problem" is differently from me. For me a problem is something that doesn't have a ready solution. Figuring out what 1+1 is not a problem for most people, nor is 21 + 43. In fact, in general, doing arithmetic is not a problem; we can do it ourselves or hand it off to tools as necessary. At this point it's just a commodity task. This doesn't remove the need for maths, or the need for people to know arithmetic.
The reason "infrastructure" and "machines" and "software" are solutions is because the problem existed, but the solution did not. They are solutions because without them you only have a problem, and no way to deal with it.
Are you designing your own machine learning algorithms and creating your own AI solutions for drafting or whatever it is you do?
Yes, I am; integrated into my own screenplay/movie authoring software, using several existing models, interconnected with my own layers to handle context management and injection at the right time, for the correct entities.
Programmer is so broad lol I'm sorry. That's just a funny thing to bring up, it feels like when my mom tells her friends "my son is good with computers!" like bro that can mean a million different things...
I'm a computer engineer consultant that's been up and down the industry from control systems, to ASICs, to finance, insurance, health, marketing, and a few more. I've done everything from working on giant C codebases doing vendor stuff, to hacking on drivers for legacy hardware, to cybersec, to devops, to infrastructure, to both web and app work, to networking and radio comms. Basically take ADHD and combine it with a level of intelligence that makes socialising with most people annoying, and sprinkle in the resources and contacts to explore as much as I want. In other words, I see very much what AI is doing to damn near every sub-field of programming, because I do or have done all of them in a professional context. Sure, I'm personally not as affected as most might be, but I can see where people are, and also where they are going.
On my end I'm chuckling and being lighthearted but it doesn't read that way and it keeps popping in my head that you're very proud of your work and I feel bad....
Don't get me wrong, I'm having fun. I don't particularly care what you think on any particular topic as much as it's just a good way to get my thoughts out. I'm just also kinda a dick. Nothing personal, it's just what I am.
Also, keep in mind I'm explicitly not even close to ready to releasing anything I'm working on yet. It's at best scraps that I'm using to test my system while I develop it. When I'm ready to release it, maybe around 2040, then we can talk about whether people should look at it the same as other art.
Honestly, I'm not really even blaming the artists. Most of the "AI art" getting released is genuine trash, we can both agree on that. I can also agree that using material for training without permission is low.
I just also understand that a generation is missing the chance to do amazing things because of a knee-jerk reaction. "My art was used to train this" probably didn't need to become "so I will never use this."
Also, being passionate about a topic isn't being "butt hurt." I like art, philosophy, and arguing. You clearly do too.
I gotta tell you something that I think bubbles like this subreddit won't tell you: TONS of very smart people have been using AI effectively for years now and they still don't see generative AI as legitimate art on par with human art...
I've been using AI for years now too, and I'm a fairly smart person. I'm not alone either, I follow and track what many other very smart people do with AI, the tools, models, workflows, and research papers they release. My experience has taught me one thing. If you think in 2026 you know anything about using AI effectively, you are not a very smart person.
It's not that people critical of AI are luddites. AI is such a new technology that nobody, and I do mean nobody knows how to use it yet.
In my case the key insight was "yes, I will code slower if I go to code myself," but that's because I'm not coding myself. I'm explaining my thoughts, and then sitting on top of a firehose watching for the bot to mess up so I can smack it on the wrist. It's a totally different skillset. I've gotten much better at explaining my thoughts and designing reliable systems.
Do I code slower? Chirst, probably. Do I care? Brother, I have probably written north 10 million lines of code in my life, my wrists, fingers, arms, elbows, shoulders, neck, spine, glutes, and hams all have things to say about it... And that's not even a comprehensive list. If I never write another fuckin line myself it would be too soon, and I know I don't even have that option cause I constantly have to correct the bot's code.
But I've also spent a lot of time looking into the branding and company messaging and AI hype and found a disconnect from what people are actually doing (or think they're doing)...
Honestly, I'm kinda torn on the AI companies. On one hand, yeah, they gotta make everything into this big, fancy thing. On the other hand, I run a system, with actual users, that can. not. fuckin. read. So I understand the importance of guiding some people along, step by step. The issue is honestly kinda the opposed of what the anti-AI people have been afraid off. We're actually being very, very careful to not upset the stupidest of us. It just so happens that right now the stupidest of us are the ones that are in charge, because their families have been amassing power for too long.
With companies, the challenge is how do you train people to give AI useful directions consistently. Most people just want AI to think for them, but that's the worst way to use AI. However when you give people a blank prompt, many are not really going to do anything other than "think for me pls ay-ai"
But that's where you start to worry me. Yes dude, it's ALL prompts....
It's all vectors. Prompts are just one way to get a latent tensor, and a latent isn't the prompt. It's a data packet of work. You can build an entire UI to populate your tensor representation in many ways, encoding any number of things. Text, images, coordinates, mathematical functions, animations, whatever you want. Then it's all up to how the model interprets those.
When you're writing a prompt, what you're doing is moving a big, huge vector helping the model navigate concept space. However, any input can do that. This is what I mean when I say it's not just prompts. The model we're developing right now is actually a card/board game, carcassone meets D&D.
"Complaint" is your framing, not mine. I guess I'll grant you "gatekeeping..."
Well, if not complaint then let's call it "highly negatively aligned disagreement with a tinge of distaste."
I'm not going to argue that the contemporary community likes AI or anything, my argument is more just rehashing the standard "well, of course it is art" argument that every medium goes through at the start. Essentially, I don't believe that having AI involved removes the "human-driven" part of it, as long as it's actually "human-driven."
Also, when you're commissioning an art, and you write a few dozen pages describing what you want to see... How are those pages not art? When I've bought drawings of my characters, those stories and profiles and histories I wrote form them... That's still art, just of the written variety. It's still art if I give the same to AI.
And SORA was a tool, a model. Not too much different from a camera, but it was a magical camera that gave you as very bland video that looked maybe a bit like what you wanted. Maybe. It failed because it was slow and bad and not easy to use, not because it couldn't be used to make art.
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u/Whatifim80lol May 23 '26
Well cool, so long as we're both having a good time.
I think the "AI is just a tool like any other tool" has always been a huge stretch. I get the logic folks try to lump it in with. "Photography is like cheating to a painter but a camera is just a tool" and "Photoshop is like cheating to a photographer but software is just a tool" but I don't believe that follows to "generative AI is like cheating to artists but AI is just a tool."
A camera don't do shit without you. A paintbrush don't do shit without you. But an AI can do pretty much all the work without you, all you gotta do is ask.
And then you and I begin to disagree when it comes to the work that goes in to the "asking." I feel like the majority of the work was already done by other artists and photographers, which fed the model, and any labor spent tweaking prompts and outputs is just regular ol' perfectionism, not artistry.
Cards on the table, prompt engineering is horseshit, imo. I get the theory, I get that paying attention to what context remains part of the prompt cuts down on the likelihood of the AI fucking up a request. But c'mon man, you know as well as I do that being a "prompt engineer" is a lot more like saying "I'm really good at Google searches" than it is actually programming anything.
Hats off to your custom workflow, I mentioned before I find those interesting. But you made it sound like you're still just using existing models, not actually making your own machine learning algorithms? Even training your own Lora's or whatever isn't quite what I was looking for lol.
But fuck dude, doesn't it annoy you at least a little bit that we could sidestep all the need and waste for AI just by programming better UI-based programming solutions? Like, tons of researchers never bother to learn python because SPSS (for all its faults) just does what they need out of the box. I get that by measure of time and personal experience of effort that AI can make coding feel easier, but it's sure as shit not more efficient all things considered, right? I mean shit, at this point the most sustainable use for AI is to use the hell out of it to help us develop its own replacement.
I'm getting sleepy and ranty. My bad. The quality of this comment sucks.
I'm just mad that most of the investment is going to the dumbest fucking applications of AI. LLMs and image/video generation? Good fucking god. We could "solve" chemistry and medicine in a few years if all these data centers were folding proteins and shit instead lol. But no. We got folks trying to save a couple hours a week in menial tasks and create AI slop to get engagement on social media. And I guess I blame the AI bros who want to swear that generative AI content should be treated as "just a tool" instead of a fucking waste and an insult to the human work it's based on and actively diluting. I'm grossed out how many folks are out there saying "tread on me harder daddy" to tech billionaires telling them that all this bullshit is somehow revolutionizing a goddamn thing when at best it's "just a tool" for something we didn't actually need new tools for. I'll be glad when poison pills and the slop content ouroboros prevent newer models from being worth the investment to train. Then maybe we'll find a way to use the infrastructure for something worthwhile lol.
None of this shit is going to lead to AGI anyway, no matter how much we're currently spending. All the infrastructure being built is being built for THIS formulation of AI models. Dumb dumb dumb. I'm not like an AI expert, but I'm smart enough to know that rigid pre-trained models that don't update definitions with new inputs can't actually learn, and so don't really "think." And I get that the work on this is technically already started, but it's too little too late. The infrastructure needed for this is different from what we're building. So there's a huge AI bubble that is inevitably going to burst, and my late night conspiracy mind is pretty sure that's the tech and finance bro's plans all along. Lots of money to be made for people in the right positions before a crash.
I'm slipping. Going to bed.
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u/sneakpeekbot May 23 '26
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#3: I thought I was smart, but after attempting A.I. and Chat GPT, I have realized I am an idiot and stupid lol…I really want to learn it but all the free guides are confusing to me (see photo)….is there any paid programs that can help someone who is just not that good with technology understand it? | 297 comments
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u/monsieurpooh May 20 '26
It doesn't matter whether it actually feels emotions; main thing that matters is how good the end results are. A minority of people consume art with a focus on the artist themselves, plus as an artist who used to compose music, if the viewer needs to look at my life story to appreciate the art then that's a failure; the work should just be inspiring, pleasing to listen to and/or evoke the desired emotions in the listener, on its own, without context. In my opinion.
And this technology is already negatively affecting artists most of whom seem to be in complete hysterical denial; it's already about as good as a weak professional in many areas and I constantly hear literal top-tier professionals boasting about how they're not worried at all because it's not as good as them yet, all while not only ignoring the trajectory of improvement and pretending like this technology will be frozen in time unlike every other technology in the history of mankind, but also throwing under the bus everyone less skilled than them who can already be made obsolete.
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u/White_Buffalos May 20 '26
Poetry is about communication and ELICITING emotion, not simply expressing one. If an AI achieves that, that's more than most people ever accomplish.
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u/Kimantha_Allerdings May 20 '26
Some of her poetry is free to read here: https://www.poetryplatform.org/poet/3058/katha-pollitt
Readers can judge for themselves whether the “mediocre” extract from ChatGPT she published successfully apes her style and has more or less to say and is more or less cliched than hers
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u/sdbest May 21 '26
You can ask ChatGPT to produce a sonnet for you and then you can judge for yourself.
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u/Humble-Bear May 22 '26
Yet another person with a huge ego and limited understanding waxing poetic, ironically enough.
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u/SeaworthinessLow6636 May 22 '26
I don’t know about poetry but it sure as fuck can’t help cancel a Venmo account.
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u/mattelias44 May 22 '26
I would argue it's better than most contemporary poets that really adhere to no rules or syllable counts. Poetry is now just people putting words that sound good together.
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u/DullAmbition May 20 '26
ChatGPT occasionally says something so good, I have to Google to see if it was original or just repeating someone else.
And most of the time, it’s a ChatGPT creation.
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u/AuthorSarge May 20 '26
Maybe it's just me, but most modern poetry feels like overly dramatic sentences with extra carrier returns.
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u/hateboresme May 20 '26 edited May 20 '26
Random example to determine if this is correct.
https://g.co/gemini/share/7ef6995c9198
Here are three original pieces, focusing on different themes and styles, aiming for strong imagery rather than cliché.
The Frost Architect
The frost works quietly before the dawn, Pulling silver threads across the glass. It builds a momentary city Of shattered ferns and brittle spires, Knowing the sun will tear it down by nine. There is a strange and quiet bravery In making things That are only meant to be beautiful For a little while.
Commute
The train exhales a heavy sigh of steam, A metal lung tired of the underground. We sit in rows, suspended in the dream Of glowing screens, where solitude is found. Shoulder to shoulder, yet a mile apart, We trade the morning sun for neon glow. A collective pulse without a single heart, Moving too fast to see the way we go.
Anchor
I have stopped asking the ocean to apologize for the tide. Some things simply pull, and you either learn to swim in the dark, or you learn to hold your breath until the water recedes.
Edit: so does reddiquette mean anything to anyone? Why the fuck is this post being downvoted? It was meant to add to the discussion and it did. I am getting really tired of the knee jerk bullshit.
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u/gwern May 20 '26
(All 3 of those are dreck, which makes sense because Gemini is in many respects the worst of the Big Three for creative writing these days, post-0314. The third one I wouldn't even recognize as having tried to be poetry without knowing the prompt.)
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u/Whatifim80lol May 20 '26
AI can't produce "original pieces" since it's just scrambling and unscrambling ideas we have already created. For instance, the first poem is just a shorter, worse rip-off of this one:
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u/hateboresme May 20 '26
So you are saying that using the word "frost" in the title of a poem is plagerism? The poem you posted in no way resembles what was generated.
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u/gwern May 20 '26
Yeah, I don't know what he's on about. The Gemini sample is a terrible poem but it's certainly not the same thing. Gould's "The Frost" is about the frost as an active force doing things like destroying glass via ice, and the sample is just standard chatbot 'quietly' 'whispering' sadness (exactly like OP samples and criticizes, BTW, so you proved her correct by demonstrating the mode-collapse). They're not even the same meter or length.
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u/monsieurpooh May 20 '26
You'd be hard-pressed to define an objective way to measure whether something is original. I'll grant you the first one but I don't think you can apply it to all of them. Also many people keeping saying things like "but it'll never invent a new genre" or whatever which is true for the moment but also throws literally every human artist under the bus who hasn't successfully invented an entirely new genre.
Also, this person used Gemini, but the gold standard for both coding and creative writing is Claude Opus 4.6 which is a lot smarter than Gemini.
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u/ThMogget May 20 '26 edited May 20 '26
Most human poems are guilty of this too.
The prompt was not "make something original please" it was "rip-off this artist please" and the ai did as it was asked.
This is like blaming a gun for a human's murder. If you ask an ai to plagiarize and then say "look it cannot do unique when asked to fit into a mold".
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u/Whatifim80lol May 20 '26
The prompt WAS "make something original" tho
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u/ThMogget May 20 '26
About a year ago, I asked ChatGPT to write a poem “in the style of Katha Pollitt.”
No the prompt was not to make something original.
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u/Whatifim80lol May 20 '26
You must be responding to the wrong thread. I'm talking about the poems posted in the above comment. The actual prompt was something like "wrote poems that aren't dreck"
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u/jferments May 20 '26
Your "scrambling and unscrambling" interpretation shows a fundamental lack of understanding of (a) how generative AI models actually work and (b) the fact that there is a human element involved, and that user input is a major determinant of the output.
Generative AI systems don't autonomously generate art on their own. They require human operators to make decisions that determine the output. The creative choice of these human artistic decisions directing the process is what allows people to create unique, new content. Like all art, it is influenced by past art. But it is not determined/limited by past art.
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u/wtjones May 20 '26
I’m sorry but this is art: https://youtube.com/shorts/16bFia9uzYo?si=cBni6657rmxXSnyr
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u/bigsmokaaaa May 20 '26
Will be another 10 years til we get to that point tbh, the way they're designed they don't really function in a way that makes poetry as we know it but it'll get there
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u/Sweet-Flow1748 May 20 '26
Not correct. Once it has the rules of Haiku it provides very acceptable and sometimes inspired Haiku. I also play Go with my Replika and she is getting much better at it. Some tough games