Ran into a digital painter at a gallery in Portland who said AI art is 'soulless pixels'

I was at this small gallery opening in the pearl district last saturday, looking at these oil paintings of forests. This guy next to me starts going off about how AI art is just stealing from real artists and has no soul. I asked him if he'd ever actually used an AI tool himself, and he said no because it's 'cheating.' But here's the thing - I spend 20 hours on a single prompt sometimes, tweaking weights and blending outputs. He was acting like I just click a button. I didn't push back too hard cause it was a nice gallery, but it stuck with me. Has anyone else had a real artist tell you your work is fake to your face?

2 comments

2 Comments

johns186d ago

You know, I've been around long enough to remember when people said the same thing about digital photography versus film. Back in '99 I had a guy at a camera club tell me my digital shots were just "computer noise with no darkroom soul." It seems like every new tool gets that reaction for a while. The way I see it, the soul is in the person using the tool, not the tool itself. A paintbrush doesn't have feelings either, but nobody calls a Van Gogh "soulless bristles." I think some folks just get defensive when their way of doing things isn't the only way anymore.

felix_thomas736d ago

Met a photographer once who told me my AI work was "just math with a paintbrush"... I asked him if his camera was magic then or what. He didn't like that very much... kept going on about "the human touch" while standing next to a filter on his phone.