Corn Maze Quilt by me
Guillermo Del Toro on AI "art"
SDCC 2025: Lucas Museum Of Narrative Art
I'm sorry but this is such a terrible argument. This is literally indistinguishable from anti-digital art rhetoric. It's indistinguishable from anti-photography-as-art rhetoric:
“When critics weren’t wringing their hands about photography, they were deriding it. They saw photography merely as a thoughtless mechanism for replication, one that lacked, “that refined feeling and sentiment which animate the productions of a man of genius,” as one expressed in an 1855 issue of The Crayon. As long as “invention and feeling constitute essential qualities in a work of Art,” the writer argued, “Photography can never assume a higher rank than engraving.”
At best, critics viewed photography as a useful tool for painters to record scenes that they may later more artfully render with their brushes. “Much may be learned about drawing by reference to a good photograph, that even a man of quick natural perceptions would be slow to learn without such help,” wrote one in an 1865 issue of The New Path. But the writer’s appreciation ended there. Photography couldn’t qualify as an art in its own right, the explanation went, because it lacked “something beyond mere mechanism at the bottom of it.”
— When Photography Wasn't Art on JSTOR (this article is from 2016 btw)
This kind of perspective conflates the medium with the method of approaching art. Art is fundamentally something we just made up and it only exists through our interpretation of things. Art is as real as gender is, maybe even less. There is no medium through which "art" cannot be done or found if we decide to do art through it. Trying to blame a medium for how it is used is ridiculous, especially when you are fixating on one specific kind of user and pretending like it's impossible for any other kind of user to exist.
I am sorry to break it to everyone but the world of computer generated art is not exclusively full of people pumping out whatever the first result is for clickbait. There are people who have backgrounds in traditional art, who continue to engage in traditional art, who also explore AI art as a medium. There are people who have made their own AI programs that run on their own computers that are trained only on their personal artwork, and who use actual knowledge of traditional artistic concepts to modify generated pieces until they are satisfied with the outcome. This is not speculation, I have seen it with my own two eyes. You cannot sum up the entirety of people who use AI to generate images as (insert eugenicist dog whistle here) idiot capitalist leeches who put literally no thought or intention or emotion into that. Do none of y'all ever question how homogenous this idea of AI users is? You really think we have found the very first medium for art ever that humans are fully incapable of being creative with on purpose? Seriously?
Now, the issues about the environment and the exploitation of workers in the imperial periphery still stand. Those are valid reasons to have serious problems with the AI industry. I am not saying that you cannot have problems with artists who use AI for those reasons. But "there are serious problems" does not translate to "any and all criticisms are okay, no matter how blatantly conservative or reactionary they are" (and AI is not the origin of water-sucking data centers in poor areas or exploitation of workers for Internet purposes. It has magnified these issues, but it is a symptom and not the cause). And Guillermo is not saying "We should not use AI for art because it is hurting the environment/workers," he is saying it is Not Art™©® because its soooo special and evil and soulless that humans are incapable of ever being thoughtful when interacting with it.
There is literally no reason that AI art, by the simple virtue of being AI generated (which only can happen when a human has an idea that they can describe accurately using artistic language into text an AI can process to create an image that the human user must decide is or is not an accurate representation of their idea, and continue to edit it as they see fit) cannot involve personality or emotion or thought. Basing your entire conception on AI off of what big companies pitch it as and what people who were already engaged in low-effort clickbait Facebook slop do is ridiculous and makes you seem incredibly out of touch. If you do not hear about AI artists who have this approach, maybe that is because even traditional artists are being harassed off of the Internet because some random person decided they are on a holy crusade against anyone they have the slightest justification to suspect is using AI. AI is not the first form of algorithmically generated art either. This line from the 1999 Fractal Art Manifesto is relevant:
[Fractal Art is not] Computer(ized) Art, in the sense that the computer does all the work. The work is executed on a computer, but only at the direction of the artist. Turn a computer on and leave it alone for an hour. When you come back, no art will have been generated.
I am someone who does a lot of digital art, particularly abstract digital art. Many people would not consider this "real art" because "the app does all the work" from their perspective. It does not matter that I, the human, am the one making the decisions based off of my own ideas. It's "too easy" (because art needs to be hard! if it doesn't take XYZ amount of hours it's not Real Art!) and I didn't make it "with my hands" and they, as people with very little experience in digital art, make a lot of assumptions about what a digital artist's approach is, and assume that I am lazy and thoughtless and that they certainly could make whatever I make, although they will never try and likely could not because they have no idea what skills it requires.
You can and should make all the arguments you wish about the environment and worker abuse, but this IS a moral panic. You are moral panicking. Things can have legitimate and serious issues that need to be addressed AND be the source of a moral panic. I do not feel welcomed as a human artist in any space where "you cannot create art with an app" is thrown around. The fact that you literally could not tell this wasn't about non-AI digital art until seeing the caption should say a lot. I love Guillermo Del Toro but it really seems to me like this is more about repeating common statements made about AI art as a show of allegiance to a certain side rather than an actually thought-through analysis of why we should be defining what is and isn't art based on mediums (or in general!)
Similarly to art, critical thinking is about how you engage with something, not what you are engaging with. If you are going to criticize people who use AI for "atrophying their critical thinking skills" (again, both unscientific and very gross) you can at least be critical about YOURSELF and whether or not these arguments actually hold up under scrutiny. The amount of people in the notes of this post and similar posts bragging about how they don't need to think critically about their anti-AI stances, because simply not using AI makes them inherently better at critical thinking than AI users, is staggering. This is not an approach that actually cares about promoting critical thinking as an approach to the world; it only cares about it as a rhetorical device to distinguish between good, smart, morally pure people and brain-dead moral degenerates. There is clearly something wrong here.
so much of being an ok person is just 1) not panicking, 2) not taking things personally, and 3) not letting the vindictive gargoyle that lives in your head tell you what to do. this sucks because brains love doing those things
RIP dick cheney, you should’ve died in prison at the Hague instead of at home surrounded by your loved ones. or, for the sake of karma, at least have gotten shot in the face.
sending your war criminals to the netherlands in the hope they cannibalize them like they did that one prime minister of theirs that time
Because I'm a biologist and a complete freak, I sometimes amuse myself thinking about like a super ultra advanced alien race that 'conquers' our planet, but instead of being all 'War of the Worlds' about it, they aren't even conquering, as far as they're concerned. There are no inteligent life forms on this planet, after all, just little animals, and they're clearly on the endangered species list. A perfect place to study rare wildlife on an untouched planet.
So there's an alien research station in space. Humanity's worst attempts to destroy it amount to a bear turning over the trash can. Aliens occasionally abduct people and return them with a clean bill of health and an ankle bracelet. It takes them forever to figure out those bracelets are screwing with their data because humans who carry them are curve-wreckingly popular.
Disaster strikes somewhere, I dunno, Japan, and there's an uptick in abductions, but of people stuck in collapsed buildings, and yeah the giant octopus tree that looks straight out of Call of Cthulhu is scary but it's also using tech you can't even comprehend to find survivors and teleport them out of the rubble. You see humans with absolutely 100% deadly injuries wisked away and a good number of them even return. There is now a new consent form specifying if rescuers can take you to the aliens, because they will probably try to save you but if they can't your family will never get your body back. You decide if your life or your body is more important.
Little by little, pragmatism wins out. The aliens aren't attacking, but they ARE abducting and doing weird tests. But the survivors mostly return unharmed with a Big Mac in hand and a weird piece of tech. There have been less valid excuses to miss school. The aliens are clearly researching humanity just as much as we are researching them, and until communications are established this status quo isn't the worst.
Ofc, then one of them actually attacks. Knocks the statue of liberty clean off. The military starts to deploy fast, and even wounds the attacker a lot, but before they can shoot the second missle it bounces. And it turns on the shooter. Every military person in the attack dies, suddenly and through means you cannot comprehend. The other aliens whisk the attacking one away. Construction materials appear as if in apology, but that's it.
The attacker was a hooligan who thought destroying wildlife was fun, and ran into something they can't handle. But even if the bear is perfectly within its rights to defend its territory, the ranger will atill have to shoot it to save the stupid brat, and hope the idiot learned their lesson.
But the bear is still dead. And the forest critters who had just started getting used to the ranger are now having second thoughts.
But the abductions continue. There are no hooligans for a while. And what else can you do? This is your home, but if the invaders really want to take it, what can you do?
So you try to stay out of their way, if you are in some serious trouble and your chances are already less than 50/50, maybe you seek them out. Sometimes they help. Sometimes they don't.
And sometimes the abductees catch glimpses of something that looks like it might have been human once, but eyes and skin all wrong, speaking incomprehensibly, and rubbing its head on the alien's 'knees'.
You go home to your dog and try not to think about it.
have I mentioned on here before that as a child I thought that "dyke" meant "badass" because I was trying to use context clues based on who I heard my parents friends call dykes
the way I learned that it was actually a word people use for lesbians, and many people find it offensive, was when my teacher was wearing a leather jacket that I thought looked really cool, and you'll never guess what I said.
Am I really so bad? Am I really so frightening? You've talked to me. You've confided in me. Have I tried to hurt you? It isn't me you're afraid of. What you're afraid of is the unknown.
ROBERT REDFORD as MR. DEATH
The Twilight Zone — 3.16 "Nothing in the Dark"