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You’re most likely consuming a large quantity of genai art without even knowing it.
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Sure, and I'm also consuming a gigantic quantity of GenAI art while knowing it, completely against my will. Which like OP has soured my overall perception of it.

The existence of inoffensive use cases doesn't invalidate anything OP is saying, that's just a natural human reaction to overexposure of a technology.

In the span of less than 2 years, pretty much everywhere I look has been inundated with zero-effort spam, manipulated imagery, etc that has had a net-negative impact on my life. Even if it may also be helpful for a small business making a flyer or whatever without actively making my life worse, that doesn't really move the needle on my overall attitude.

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  > manipulated imagery
And we thought iPhone camera videos were bad... (they were (and are) though)
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Sure, and there’s lot of great man made art that I don’t enjoy quite as much because I can’t get the question out of my head, is this even a photograph someone took, is this even a painting someone bothered to paint. I get the sense that there are a lot of folks that just want the end result judged on its own merits, like, is it a funny vine or not, is it a compelling beautiful digital painting or not, but I want to know whether there’s a person behind it, expressing themselves, growing as an artist etc, or if the picture on my phone is totally divorced from any humans actual desire to say something. Having them mixed in the same pot just makes me less hungry.
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This is where curation matters, eg in a newsroom or gallery. Provenance is their job, and if done well, can connect people in a way that an unfiltered social media firehose can't.
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Yea fair enough, I’m hoping I can encourage the folks in my life that are not adept at telling truth from fiction to just cut out looking at any social media firehouse.

It’s so dumb that Zuck and Elmo want to inject^H^H^H^H^H^Hrecommend content into these people’s feeds while they’re checking in on their neices and nephews and local book clubs.

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I never understood what people are trying to say with comments like that.

- You're making unsubstantiated claim

- personally targeting someone you don't even know

- in order to celebrate presumed success of a mass fraud?

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You're conflating mainstream popular opinion and professional usage. They're entirely separate. The obvious low effort pieces get lambasted. Meanwhile the high effort work doesn't draw attention. The public perception right now has little to do with technical capabilities being driven almost entirely by social factors.
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I feel like it was inevitable that it would become slop. The models are impressive, but they can really only get you 80% there.

If you want a video of a dancing cat, sure, you can get that. But if you want an orange tabby doing the moonwalk or the robot, that's a lot harder. You'll have to generate dozens of videos and fine tune prompt incantations before you get what you want, if you even do before you hit a rate limit or you get frustrated. If you want something specific and unique and interesting, you still need to put in a lot of effort. Therefore, most videos that people actually make and share are pretty generic.

I think most art models have subtle tells and limitations similar to textual LLMs too, just a little harder to recognize. Certain ideas and imagery will be easier to generate and more likely to fill in the gaps of your prompt. The technology is fascinating compared to the nothing that we had before, but it still has real limitations - try to get it to generate an Italian plumber wearing a red hat that isn't Mario, for example.

All that to say, the trend towards low effort, repetitive, and uncreative results is inherent in the medium. Most users will prompt for a generic dancing cat and get something resembling a cat doing something that resembles a dance and that will flood social media. The few people going for a more creative and specific artistic view will be frustrated by the constant rolling of dice, and if they do make something they work hard on, it will be drowned out by the low effort slop posts. And if you're frustrated by those limitations and want to make something intentional, then you'll eventually gravitate towards Photoshop or Blender where you can actually craft the exact thing you want.

These models do not really "democratize art", they just make it really easy to generate visually interesting noise. Once the novelty wears off, the limitations are apparent. Art has always been democratized anyway - Blender and Krita are free, and pencils are cheap.

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What the masses have found entertaining has always been referred to as slop, so I am not sure it matters.

Novels, cinema, television, comic books, etc.

They were all considered careless skill-free slop at some point.

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