> I can't commission an artist without questioning if they are using AI, which isn't acceptable in the projects I am commissioning for.

We've always judged the output, so why stop now. AI is just a tool. The artist still owns the output.

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ShinyLeftPad a day ago | parent | next [-]

We pretty much never only judged the output. An oil painting is valued because it's an oil painting among other things. If people know you have worked on something for a long time, it's valued more than something you just came up with this afternoon. A chair crafted by a woodworker, even if it's worse in some ways, is valued over an IKEA chair produced in a fraction of the time.

Generative models are like outsourcing to cheap mass production factory, not an advanced woodworking tool in your basement.

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tomcatfish a day ago | parent | next [-]

Both of those things are visible in the output. An Ikea chair isn't denigrated because we're such snobs, but because it's made of inferior materials. If Ikea started selling solid hardwood bookshelves tomorrow at the same price as their other stuff, I'd be driving right over there!

	▲	rootusrootus a day ago \| parent \| next [-]
		Ikea does sell some hardwood furniture, though I don't know if any of their bookshelves are. But it's definitely within the realm of possibility.
	▲	ShinyLeftPad 21 hours ago \| parent \| prev \| next [-]
		> Both of those things are visible in the output Yes, they are different, but even with woodworker's one worse we still value it more for HOW it's made, not just what it is at this moment in time
	▲	komali2 a day ago \| parent \| prev \| next [-]
		No, because you can get indistinguishable hand painted oil clones of famous paintings from Vietnamese rep shops and they obviously sell for far less than the originals. Barring AI generated art and prose assets is valid, if for example you don't want to have the AI generation marker on steam, or you object to the use of AI for various ethical reasons. Also there's apparently quite the market of motivated purchasers that want to signal their anti AI values by buying from projects that don't use AI.
	▲	bigfishrunning a day ago \| parent \| prev [-]
		> If Ikea started selling solid hardwood bookshelves tomorrow at the same price as their other stuff, I'd be driving right over there! better go quick, they'll end up losing a lot of money selling more expensive furniture at a cheaper price...

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skybrian an hour ago | parent | prev | next [-]

The IKEA chair costs less, but to say it’s valued less is too simple. Valued by whom? Only a small minority will ever buy a chair that was handmade. Presumably they prefer it, but they’re rare.

IKEA’s many customers deliberately chose the IKEA chair. We don’t know what other chairs they might have preferred if they were the same price, because they’re not.

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Toynbeeidea a day ago | parent | prev [-]

Hmm, I don't know that time invested inherently equates to quality. I would place FAR more value on a comfortable functional mass-assembled chair than some wobbly piece of crap some guy spent two weeks cobbling together in his garage.

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ShinyLeftPad 21 hours ago | parent [-]

It's not just time, it's also effort and other non obvious things like supporting a real human being

> I would place FAR more value on a comfortable functional mass-assembled chair than some wobbly piece of crap some guy spent two weeks cobbling together in his garage

If it's wobbly then sure, but what if it was made by someone with a modicum of expertise to make it not wobbly.

then again, i don't mind a good wobble, it's a fidget opportunity and i like to fidget

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Toynbeeidea 21 hours ago | parent | next [-]

Time and effort are not indicitive of quality.

I suppose we're talking about "craft" vs "art." Making chairs is a craft. There are objectively "right" ways to do it. You can still be artistic about it, so long as the craftsmanship is sound. That being said, I will take a well-crafted chair over one that is not every time over the "artistic" one.

With regards to writing, I can't just throw word salad together and call it a day. But my writing style is my own voice - I pretty much write the same way I speak. With AI... well, after you've read enough of it, you notice that it, too, has its own voice. Like, I can distinguish the writing style of Gemma4 real quick. It smells like ozone.

I don't necessarily mind, so long as its telling me something coherent and accurate. You could argue it lacks originality, and it certainly lacks agency: But it IS usually well-crafted. I'll take it. Won't stop me from reading, say, PKD novels. But miss me with the artistry of, say, Finnegan's Wake, or even Ulysses, I'm apparently way too dumb for those (yes, I've tried). PKD would crank out multiple novels every year, Joyce took like decade to write incomprehensible nonsense.

	▲	ShinyLeftPad 21 hours ago \| parent [-]
		Define quality.

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21 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

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Ozzie_osman a day ago | parent | prev | next [-]

> We've always judged the output, so why stop now. AI is just a tool. The artist still owns the output.

But we didn't. We relied heavily on a mix of trust and maybe occasional sampling. Having to verify everything is inefficient and exhausting.

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recursive 21 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

> We've always judged the output, so why stop now. AI is just a tool. The artist still owns the output.

Who are we? What output? Organic certification has a long history in agriculture. To get certified requires more than just judging the output. My process are regulated or judged, and have been, using criteria other than the blinded output.

	▲	Gabriel54 14 hours ago \| parent [-]
		That may be true but code isn’t a potato. It is in fact possible to judge code on its merits regardless of its origin.

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OneManyNone a day ago | parent | prev | next [-]

Even if this were true, it doesn't address the other element of the problem, which is that flooding the zone with horrible crap makes it harder to find the good stuff, and forces you to waste a lot more of your own time filtering crap.

Yes, I can usually identify AI slop within a couple paragraphs, but it still wastes my time to encounter it, and if it's my entire feed, it's going to drown out the good stuff I'd actually want to read. Same for literature at a larger scale, to say nothing of the countless scandals where obvious AI-written crap wins various writing competitions.

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solid_fuel 7 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

> We've always judged the output, so why stop now. AI is just a tool. The artist still owns the output.

Customers never checked every hand in an oil painting to make sure they were painted correctly. They always trusted that the artist - who spent hundreds of hours painting the thing, instead of just pasting a prompt into a slop cannon - was familiar enough with the entire work and had spent enough time working on it to catch stupid mistakes.

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tarballing a day ago | parent | prev [-]

Imagine a relative passed and you commission someone to draw a portrait of them to show at the funeral. The artist has good reviews and all their work looks impressive; their portfolio has hundreds of amazing photorealistic portraits. It's expensive, but nothing is too good for a passed loved one.

After weeks of waiting, you finally get the portrait ...aaaaand it looks nothing like them. There's weird artifacting all over it and it looks like a supermodel imposter with meat-moss hair. You try to contact the artist, but they've completely vanished: socials deleted, emails unreplied, just gone.

Oh well, they owned the output, right?