if only there were platforms you could migrate to that wouldnt have this problem
This doesn’t work for artists who need to make a living. The art-buying audience is not on the platforms you are talking about.
Instagram also needs to “make a living”. They do that by making your life as an artist harder. You have to make a choice between using software that respects you and having a smaller following, or using a platform that, in every way that you can imagine, is abusing you.
They do make that choice. You just don’t like the result.
Neither do they, it would seem.
Then they gotta, as the saying goes, lay in the bed they made, except they’re (helping) making it for others, too.
They want the benefit of the privacy-respecting network, they want the exposure of the artist-hostile network, but they don’t want to contribute to bringing their audience to the privacy-respecting network. That choice is 100% on them, then.
I think we should put the blame where it belongs. Insta and all other plattforms have massive amounts of power and reach. They make more money from their users than the other way around. Its also not just artists livlyhoods on the line. With that level of power we need to inforce respinsibillity as well.
Your plan does simply not work. Just like you are not comsuming solely ethical products so does everyone else. “personal responsibility” IS what these companies want you to believe the solution is when we KNOW it is not.
There will not be enough people leaving to make a difference IF enough people would leave to theoretically make a differnce than the new place gets either sold to the bigger company OR sued OR banned since they are basically our politicians bosses. You can’t fight these things with “personal choices”
We should always stand with the people with us in the mud and demand responsibillity from those who have actual power. Just assume that everybidy in your class is doing their best and will probably be more deserving of your support. They want you to blame the creators don’t help them.
The question is if it matters. If an image can’t be distinguished from what AI produces, isn’t it obviously slop too and not art either? It might be pretty but not art.
It’s only art if you look at it and it tells you something that can’t easily be communicated with a thousand words. Which means it’s subjective.
To some the true dystopian take for me is that anything pretty a human produces is automatically art. Because that means there is no value “actual art”. It’s all just pretty pictures.
I’m not going to say that all things created by people aren’t slop, but it’s also true that our context for understanding art can change over time. What we’re getting now, with certain art styles being associated with slop is a kind of Seinfeld effect.
To give a specific example: When the movie Annihilation came out, it quickly became a favorite of mine. I loved its visual style, and the narrative theme about broken people. A few months ago I re-watched it and realized that its visuals have been so coopted by endless slop recreations that I couldn’t disassociate it from AI output. Even though the themes were still there and no less resonant than when I first watched it, my brain couldn’t enjoy the film because I kept thinking about slop. The movie hadn’t changed and all the artistic intentionality behind its creation was still there, but my ability to enjoy it was destroyed.
Interesting. Because Gen AI is certainly the annihilation of certain facets of human creativity (I’d say the sloppiest aspects). What is creativity without meaning but annihilation? (EDIT: I’ve recently rewatched Annihilation and rewatching the ending now again, I love it more than ever because how relevant it is to the currently ongoing annihilation of our civilization).
It’s also a great example of how hate bandwagoning reduces enjoyment. I’ve seen this with “Rings of Power”. It’s not the best TV show, certainly not the worst. There are like 4 subreddits discussing the show, 3 filled with endless hate and vitriol. 1 with discussions about who or how artistic decisions were made this or that way and how it conflicts with the source material. Finding that community made watching the show more enjoyable again.
So the community you choose absolutely does affect how you can enjoy entertainment or art. Basically you shouldn’t allow yourself to be infected with hate mongering because that has it’s own “economy” of karma and grifting on e.g. youtube.
A more important example would be how judgemental opinions can affect the view on “minority” cultures or the global south. Liberalism wants to commercialize it, conservatism wants to purify it.
Let’s remove art from the debate then. It’s something that presumably took hard work and now that hard work is put into question.
It is but that is the harsh reality. Gen AI is no doubt an insult to what it means to be human, what we value about ourselves. What it means you either just enjoy the process, or have to work harder to create art that rises above. As long as you can see something with your inner eye and communicate that to others through your medium, art is saved.
But how much hard work is put into stuff that is never even questioned because it isn’t “trending” like OP for some reason? Because there isn’t enough bandwidth? How is that not the same problem we’ve had for the last decade? People created things in obscurity and nobody gave a shit.
If an image can’t be distinguished from what AI produces, isn’t it obviously slop too and not art either?
I can’t distinguish AlteredEgo’s comment from AI, so I think it may just be slop by default. Yeah. Unfortunately, he has nothing interesting to say—I’ve literally heard these exact words from like a hundred other places, so… I guess he’s just not worth talking to. What a boring guy. Really an NPC, if I’ve ever seen one.
Try to be more original, Ego. Originality, yeah. Then I think you might be worth listening to.
Hahahe touche. Just to be clear, originality or being novel would be only one facet of what makes good art or not. AI models could soon produce endless “novel” garbage which remain garbage.
And yeah you do have a point, if you look at the endless garbage comments rolling in on social media it does beg the question. If it’s indistinguishable from AI comments, what does it say about humanity? Or does social media diminish us as a species?
But I’m a proponent of using advanced algorithms and now LLMs to improve discourse on social media. For example the endless reposts of the same garbage, with the same emotional manipulation for karma or propaganda - this an AI model could see and tag. Like “this repost #120 of a video showing X without mentioning the context Y. Funny comments are “Z” and “W”. Emotional manipulation towards “U” politics.”
We as a species are easily emotionally manipulated. And those with money and power or those who find themselves in a righteous mob of same thinking morons have the ability to reshape how people perceive the world. This is how all facets of the pluralistic overton window have become more and more polarized and have shifted towards authoritarianism. Because the social media tools spread certain memes globally now. And you see that Lemmy, despite not being owned and controlled by capitalists and developed by communists has not magically made this problem go away.
If you hate AI slop comments you should also hate human slop comments at least to a degree. It is degrading to know that much of our content can be faked by a LLM machine, but it also opens the possibility to rise above it. Simply by tagging “this is AI quality garbage”. This is one application where the primitive verbal intelligence of AI could be useful as a tool because it can be broadly applied. To raise the bar.
