Yet I’m using AI-created illustrations for my graphic novel, fully aware of copyright and legal debates.
Both Copilots and art generators are trained on vast datasets—so why do we cheer one and vilify the other?
We lean on ChatGPT to rewrite blog posts and celebrate Copilot for “boosting productivity,” but AI art still raises eyebrows.
Is this a matter of domain familiarity, perceived craftsmanship, or simple cultural gatekeeping?
Personally, I have no time for gen-AI in pretty much any context, at least given the current landscape.
And plenty of people seem to accept, if not love, gen-AI art. I don't get it, but it's true.
> While browsing YouTube, an AI-generated video appeared and I reflexively told my wife, “That’s AI—skip it.”
My reflex whenever I encounter gen-AI output in any form: text, code, image, music, video, what have you. I find all off it mid in the best of cases, and usually think it's quite terrible. I regularly see posts of the form "you'll never believe this amazing AI generated picture/video/paper/program, and when I check it out I feel like I'm taking crazy pills because I just don't see the magic.
Just my $.02, not inflation adjusted. You (and many others) may well feel differently.
I get a kick out of generating photos with family and friends in different styles like Play-Doh, Simpsons, Ghibli, etc. All of them like it, too. Maybe that's what people like, a very relatable use of the technology.
In general when friends and family say they like something you do, they might not like that but they say they do because they like interaction with you, or are being polite, or they want to encourage action or they dont fully understand what you do but appreciate you are including them and so on. Unless you have a candid person in this group you should be skeptic when they provide feedback about a piece of tech you are building (or an AI generated image).
> I reflexively told my wife, “That’s AI—skip it.”
> Yet I’m using AI-created illustrations for my graphic novel
Aren't you worried people will skip your graphic novel?
I've used AI art a lot for tabletop RPGs. The level of actual creative control isn't great, even for what should be an easy case of one character in profile against a blank background. Even if you know how to use it well you're wrestling the systems involved to try and produce consistent output ot anything unusual. And that's fine for Orc #3 or Elf Lord Soandso, which are only going to be featured for fifteen minutes at a time and in contexts where you can crop out bad details or use low-effort color grading to get a unified tone.
But for a graphic novel? What? I can't imagine giving up that level of creative control, even as someone who sucks at actual drawing. You'll never be able to get the kind of framing, poses, and structuring you want, doubly so the second you want to include anything remotely original. It's about the absolute worst case for actually using these generation tools.
It takes seconds to generate a panel for a comic; you make a sketch, then generate hundreds of candidates, pick the best one, maybe correct flaws in Photoshop, and it's still faster and cheaper than drawing it yourself from scratch. It's just another workflow for an artist. I use Blender to model rough sketches of 3D scenes, then use ComfyUI to render high quality images with lots of details.
It's very obvious that they're AI generated, and the authors are typically upfront about it. I still feel a bit of an ick when I see them, and Patreon discussions for the creators I follow also have similar sentiments. Not sure if it's truly a tolerable use-case for AI, but thought I'd throw it out there.
Code assistants are used by programmers wanting to be more productive. Things that claim to replace programmers entirely get dissed. (But it's more "that won't work" rather than "that's not allowed", because, well, it doesn't work. Yet at least.)
AI-generated content is probably cheap spam, even though it in theory could be made by someone knowledgeable using the AI as a tool.
Things generated by an AI are lower quality than things made by someone competent... but depending on what you're doing, that might not matter.
Ultimately, it's me who's responsible for the end product and I accept that and review the code. But it's definitely been handy.
However, AI art generators in their current form may render all artistic jobs unlivable within 20 years. Learning to draw is one of the most time-intensive skills to master. A master's degree in CS is sufficient to secure a good job, but five years of experience in art makes you a "novice". AI art is just good enough to devalue art as a whole, making it an infeasible profession to pursue, as it's already near the minimum wage on average.
In 20 years, there may not be any new professional digital artists. All art will become AI art. Do we like that world? Cheap, corporate, lazy, with no sign of effort or dedication.
I want LLMS to go away as well, but at the very least, there will always be a market for real text, and always be people able to produce it.
Developers saying LLMs are not good enough to replace programmers but can replace artists.
An artist can say the same: LLMs are not good enough to replace artists but they seem good enough to replace programmers.
However, AI image generation is immensely helpful when I want to do a painting. Before I would find photos I liked and stitch them together, or try to imagine things. Now I can get an image much closer to reference.
With code, my feeling is that we have to write way too much of it right now to express what we want. I can write a small bit of text to the LLM and it will fill out 75%+ of the code over multiple files, which I then just need to shape. So much is structure that needs repeating in variations. I don't have an answer but it seems like there's something else missing from our tools and LLMs are providing a bad imitation of what it should be.
For code, it augments my ability to produce code. It's very easy to tinker and modify that code if I so choose, and it's much easier to steer it into the right direction (at least when it comes to the output of the code). For art, it just replaces things. If I create an image with AI for example, it's not that simple to drop it into Procreate and start tinkering with it. There are no layers, no brushes, no masks that come with it - it is the output. I'll just re-prompt, or try to find style guides or reference pictures, but there's no place for an artist in the loop. Others might be using these differently of course, but at least my impression is that it's much more of a replacement when it comes to art.
(from listening a lot to artists, so might have some bias). I haven't actually attempted either ... I find the code generation not very useful and the artistic structures interesting, but something's missing.
Also, I like AI art; I made a Lego model and then fed it into an image generator to kinda generate a "reverse" reference image. So it looks like the Lego model tries to look like the reference pictures, even though its look is more dictated by the very constraint parts list (it's an alt build of an existing model): https://rebrickable.com/mocs/MOC-218657/RedNifre/31124-battl...
I could not have drawn these artworks myself and the use is so silly that I would not spend any money for paying for them: Without AI, these would not exist.
That's not the generalization that I would make of HN sentiment.
But one generalization I'll assert is that there seems to be a very strong undercurrent of self-interest, often to the point of cheating. It's not universal, but it might be over 50%. The field has been selecting for, and refining for, people who seek big paychecks, and train for the BS rituals (e.g., FAANG interviews, resume-driven-development, metrics, Agile reactive theatre, growth scam startups).
How are all those people going to think about tools that might give them an edge in their operating mode. Would they be thinking about quality, maintainability, security, team, company goals, or ethics.
Speak for yourself.
As for the why, it's primarily ego and fear.
And you told your wife to skip the video because most AI-generated content is, quite frankly, garbage. It's not garbage because it's AI though; it's garbage because the person making it probably doesn't care much about quality.
That's not my experience at all. Hacker News is indeed an echo chamber, but sometimes things escape, and discussion of how much people hate AI "art" is becoming increasingly common among my non-tech friends. The earliest example most people point to is the Christmas Coca-Cola commercial.
Furthermore I've never really encountered people IRL who hate AI art. The vast majority seem to be neutral towards it.
Also, do they hate all AI art, or just art where they can tell because it looks like AI art?
Now, complete the ritual. Take their place and bring art and culture to your new empire.
I'm indifferent on co-piliot stuff. For my domain it isn't as useful as using snippets, but code tends to be easier to follow the 3c's on than art. Most coede people don't want copied already is obfruscated or simply not publicly readable.
Most artists want to create beautiful art, it's a form of self expression. Creating art just for outputs sake without adding love seems cold and capitalistic.
So AI enhances and delivers what programmers want, and diminishes what artists want.
Not anybody I read.
It's reasonable to hard skip on AI videos because almost all are currently slop, to the extent that I don't see why you needed to explicitly suggest to your wife to skip, rather than her noticing it on her own and doing so automatically.
It's largely driven by social dynamics. If your group generally expresses disgust for AI art, you subconsciously know you have to have the same opinion about it.
Your post is a bad example where you make an artificial distinction based on how you generate it in order to make it okay.
It's okay for what you are doing because it's incredibly convenient. It's not okay for other people because you know it's unpopular.
For videos also, you need to distinguish between that and images or other types of art. Videos are more challenging than still images and just starting to get to the point where the latest ones don't have a lot of weird obvious spatial temporal artifacts.
Likely all of the topics covered in the question. aka Takes time/money to train/become skilled in given professional area. Things that undermine that money/time/training in way that have to retrain before the professional investment paids off tend to cause issues. Legal framework hasn't caught up with changes, so difficult/more costly & time consuming to resolve issues that do happen.
'Historical' parallels abound:
More same thing, different historical context / changes in available technology: -------------------[0] : https://www.adn.com/business/article/amazon-prime-eases-rura...
[1] : https://www.weforum.org/stories/2016/06/leading-innovation-t...
[2] : https://inspireip.com/xerox-failure-reasons/
[3] : https://spectrum.ieee.org/how-the-ibm-pc-won-then-lost-the-p...
[4] : https://www.damninteresting.com/curio/the-fax-machines-of-th...
The entire framing of this question, as posed, is transparently self-serving as a justification to seek validation for a process which, fundamentally, contradicts the purpose and definitions of art.
Code is a functional set of orders to a machine, nothing more. Nobody is buying paperbacks of source code to read on an airplane, correct? It’s refreshing to have this opportunity to confront these absolutely infuriating equivocations which have momentum in the present day.
There’s a reason the term “AI slop” is floating around with such frequency. I am an artist and a musician and a writer. You are not a part of our “we” buddy. Sorry not sorry.
The style, when it is so obvious, becomes indexed in my mind with low-quality waste-of-time videos.
I blame the tool users, not the tool. The people sloshing these things up onto YouTube are deliberately flinging enough crap at the wall to get clicks. Imagine if they put some oomph into it. Focus on the topic, emphasize main points instead of having a monotonous litany that just sounds like facts strung together without logical connection. Have a point. Thesis, summary, argument, elaboration, summary, map to the thesis, conclusion... Or, if it's fiction, give me three act structure, or seven-point plots.
Otherwise, I'll continue to recognize, and discard what are literally garbage videos, generated by the thousands, to waste our time.
Personal attacks like this are not OK on Hacker News and we ban people who do it repeatedly.
Please have a read of the guidelines and make an effort to adhere to them in future.
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
Correlative: why are people so upset about identity theft?