AI Art

Expanding on a comment exchange from a previous post.

Do I like AI art, or do I disapprove of it? There are at least two things to take into consideration. (There are likely a lot more than two, but for the moment these two are the ones which occur to me.) The first is the quality of the art's appearance - how good does it look? The second is the content of the artwork itself - what is shown in the picture?

With regard to the quality of the appearance, I feel that a competent artist produces work which is superior to AI. This is largely because I feel that AI artwork looks rather bland. I suspect that this is because it is too uniform. A human artist will necessarily have more variation in the appearance of the art, some aspects will receive more attention than others, some aspects will be slightly less perfect. This can give the final image a greater richness of appearance. Although I grant you, a human artist of less skill will have an accumulation of such issues which falls short of what well-designed AI artwork can achieve.

However, I feel that the issue of overall quality is less important than the content of the artwork. This is the matter of the design implemented by the person behind the art, whether done by the artist himself or by someone directing an AI tool. What are the expressions and body language of the characters? What are they wearing? (If anything.) What are they doing? What is the setting? If there is any dialog, what are they saying? At least for erotica, this sort of thing can be much more important than how skillfully hands and faces are rendered. This is the sort of thing which captures the viewer's imagination, and either gets the viewer to immediately reach between his/her legs or just yawn and move on. When art design shows good imagination, the works of a rough artist who can barely sketch a human figure can possibly be more interesting or exciting than something rendered by a highly skilled artist. And in this regard, if an AI tool is skillfully used by someone with a good imagination who directs the tool in producing an interesting concept, then we the viewer can gain something worthwhile which we might not have otherwise been able to get if the person in question has little or no skill as an artist in their own right.

And so ... If we are talking about run of the mill art, nudes or standard sexual acts without much else going on, then I am generally opposed to AI art. In that case the quality of the art is the most important thing, and AI art simply cannot reach the same level of interest to the eye as a good artist. But if we're talking about art which captures and entices the viewer's imagination, then while a good artist is very welcome, I am also happy to receive the efforts of less skilled artists, or people who can get an AI tool to output what they have imagined.