It makes me *deeply* upset that people want to use AI for art

Bit personal, but I had one sort of traumatic experience that people commented sort of changed me fundamentally as a person. My mom said “wow that thing really did a number on you 😕”. Friends said I seemed withdrawn and not like the same person. I broke up with my gf at the time cause I just couldn’t do a relationship. I almost felt like I just lost faith in people

I wasn’t able to express the feeling to anyone and felt such deep frustration, which made me feel so isolated and alone. I wished people could understand. I wished they could see what I see. Maybe then they’d “get it”

Then it really made me think — can I get people to understand what I’m feeling? and I thought of a story to frame it. It felt like it came to me almost fully formed, except the last act. This was actually a good thing. My protagonist was a reflection of me, and the second act ended with where I am now. I thought of where she should go, what she should do, and in the process, this helped me in my own life

I let some close friends and family read it and they all said that they actually were surprised at just how much they enjoyed the story. I asked them if they understood what I was going for, and it seemed like it finally “clicked” for them what was going on in my mind and what I had been struggling with. This experience actually lead me to write in my spare time and man… life changing. Literally life changing. Instead of scrolling on social media each night, I write. Most of it is garbage that I throw out, but I never regret a single moment I spend writing. I don’t even care if none of it ever gets published

So then I find out about AI art and it seems like people are fundamentally misunderstanding the process of writing that I discovered. The entire point was the process. The entire point was my choices in the story. If you wrote a story with the same tagline as mine, it would end up way different, and that’s great! That’s why art is so much fun!

I just don’t understand these AI bros, it seems like they view art solely as a commodity to be exchanged at a fair market rate. Like they go into the movie theatre and instead of looking for a movie they want to see, they simply go with the movie that has the highest box office return because “that’s what the market has decided is good”. Maybe they look over the small indie movie that they may have really connected with. It seems like a cynical, sad way to go through life

And also… these AI bros seem to have NO sense of good story. I tried AI for storytelling. I asked it to write a new arc for one piece, you know what it did? It took the early arc from naruto with zabuza and changed it to be one piece. It probably just went into its knowledge and said “one piece… shonen… big 4… naruto? He probably wants a story like naruto” then pumped that out

It’s just so disappointing to me that people actually want AI anywhere near art. Art is for humans. You quite literally cannot use AI to do what I did, as it would provide no catharsis or self expression. Anything made by a machine is not art, because machines have no need for self-expression and human connection