The issue isn’t the quality or the visual result. It’s not just slop because it looks bad.

Art is as much about the journey as it is about the destination. It’s the friction of someone going through each detail, making a choice. It’s the artist taking time to figure out how they want to convey what they’re feeling and thinking.

The reduction of this friction culminates in the reduction of the piece’s essence.

Yeah I understand your point because I've made music and design for 25 years the old "manual way", and there is definitely less friction with AI than there is the manual way.

But what interests me about AI is that it is possible to do things that you couldn't do before particularly in processing images. For these images I took photos of the bottles myself and used other images and the AI can place the camera anywhere in a scene and place objects anywhere in the scene, and things like that. You can create almost any image you can imagine with the right sources and the right prompt, and even here there is some friction because many images do end up looking like slop and you have to prompt it right to get something non-slop like out of it (though not always).

This ability to manipulate and process information is what makes AI interesting to me, although I'm not sure I adequately explained it. It feels like a new tool like Photoshop except across a different dimension. I feel like we've barely scratched the surface of what's possible to create.