Generation Why? A Millennial’s Perspective on Art

Has Art Been Destroyed by Gen-ai, or has This Happened Before?

Photo by Blond Fox on Unsplash

Back in my youth in the before time, I wasn’t given the option to learn how to draw on a tablet or computer because that technology didn’t really exist at the time. No, I was stuck using a soft number 2 pencil smearing graphite dust all over a cheap blank piece of paper. It’s insane to me that we as a society have gone from using nothing but completely traditional art tools to a digital parrot barfing out fake digital copies that look like someone took a lighter to an old plastic CD anime case bought from Sam Goody. Crazy part is, I’m not even forty yet.

How did we get here? Well, I believe that the current form of art ‘enlightment,’ as those who hate art in all forms call it, is due to the same thing that caused World War 2. Artist envy. There is a huge group of people who envy artists and their ability to create beautiful pieces of art from nothing. What nobody tells these parrot worshipers is that beautiful art is created on the backs of decades of hard work, patience, and failed drawings. And by nobody, I mean pretty much everybody has told them that. Your favorite artist spent so ridiculously much time honing their art skills that they literally earned their art style in the most real way possible.

What your favorite artist actually did was:

• Studied art fundamentals

• Practice by drawing tons of crappy art, possibly worse than what non-artists draw starting out

• Steadily get better while their hands get good at drawing lines and shapes

• Grapple with crippling imposter syndrome because their art never matches the sense of style in their head

Here’s what your favorite artist didn’t do:

• Type in a sentence and let a parrot hallucinate an abomination image of all the art styles ever uploaded to the internet

• Doom the planet to a nuclear apocalypse that would make Fallout look like a tropical paradise

There is some comparison to gen-ai art being compared to digital art vs. traditional art, and I would like to run an experiment to prove that, not only is this not true, but it’s completely ridiculous. Ready to complete an experiment with me? Okay! There is a powerful art software available for free called Krita. Go ahead and download it. Hell, you can get it here if you don’t want to search for it. Alright, now that it’s on your pc, grab your computer mouse or the cheapest, twenty dollar-est drawing tablet and start marking the canvas with it. Go ahead. Make a masterpiece.

Oh, is there nothing but a bunch of marks on a page? Yeah, it’s almost like the comparison is not even close. Even if there are a few shortcuts you can take with digital art software, you still have to actually draw the art. Some 11,000 gallon drinking robot parrot isn’t going to do it for you. Which is really the core of the issue.

Gen-ai art, writing, coding, music, etc. is for people who don’t understand art, don’t want to learn art, and don’t even care about art. They want something produced that they don’t want to pay for, and they’re willing to burn down the planet to get it. It’s those same people who, before gen-ai, would message creative types trying to get them paid in ‘exposure.’ Point is, they were around before this horrible environment destroying machine was created, and they will exist after gen-ai has either drank all of our water dry or the data centers have been destroyed.

The only reason these anti-art types are so powerful right now is because we have to draw parallels to a hundred years ago, because time is a flat circle. Adolf Hitler was a failed art student. He couldn’t grasp the fundamentals in any meaningful way, so he ended up getting embarrassed quite profusely and ended up in control of the Nazi Party. In turn, the Nazi Party went on to remove or destroy any art or creative expression anywhere near them in Germany at the time.

Here’s the trick; the internet didn’t exist in the 1930s, so it’s a whole lot harder to get rid of art now than it was back then. So the tech-oligarchs invest in a system that allows them to make ‘art’ too, and instead of deleting the internet, they flood it with more gen-ai garbage than anyone can handle to make it into a gen-ai landfill.

This didn’t happen by accident. The reason that there is so much gen-ai images everywhere is because it makes it so much harder to determine what is real and what is fake. Since it makes comparing art side by side a lot harder, they can now flood the world with their fake garbage art and nobody will be the wiser. Right?

Wrong.

It’s no secret that gen-ai garbage is incredibly unpopular. What I was not expecting was why it became so unpopular. When I was younger, there was a large amount of demand for art that adhered to highly polished standards. There was a lot of anime becoming mainstream around the time I was coming of age, so it was pretty hard to get anyone to buy art that didn’t look like it came out of Dragon Ball Z around the time.

Gen-ai promised that universal appeal, at least that’s what I thought, but I think culture shifted around this style. Which makes sense, considering how much of this parrot crap flooded the internet. When we see everything look basically the same, we want to see something different. Something with imperfections, something with bad anatomy but in a human way, something with some care put into it.

I compared gen-ai to a parrot, and will continue to do so for the rest of its existence. The reason I do is because gen-ai doesn’t understand anything about the world. It is a blind, deaf, unfeeling thing that is built to appease its creators. Gen-ai doesn’t understand what a circle is, or what rendering is, or the fact that your hand has five fingers that can stretch out to the size of your forearm. The best it can do is regurgitate facts about those things I mentioned with copious amounts of mistakes.

Gen-ai can’t think for itself. Or at all. It understands what we want from it in the same way a parrot repeats words said around it. So where do we go from here?

Pick up a pencil, tablet stylus, computer mouse, pen, finger paints, or whatever you have that can make a mark on a surface and start drawing if you’re interested in getting artwork. Even if your art is atrocious and burns your eyes to look at, draw it anyway. Give yourself the gift of learning how hard it actually is to make something pristine and polished as a human being.

If you try to make something, you can now see why some commission prices are so high. In fact, I’d wager that you can come away from the experience thinking that a hundred bucks for a full illustration is actually a bargain.

And if you’re worried about being ridiculed as bad as Hitler was back in the day, don’t worry. Everybody’s currently too busy doing that to gen-ai users right now to bring anything to your art other than appreciation that you didn’t use disgusting ai to make it.

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