Vent: People keep calling AI art "not real art" because they think the machine does all the work

I've been in this community for about 8 months now, and I'm getting tired of the same argument over and over. Last week I was at a local coffee shop showing some of my AI landscapes to a friend, and a stranger chimed in saying I just typed a sentence and got a picture. That's not how it works at all. I probably spent 2 hours tweaking prompts, adjusting negative prompts, and redoing generations until I got the lighting and composition right. Then I did another 30 minutes of post-processing in Photoshop to fix the edges and colors. The machine doesn't just magically know what you want. It takes skill and patience to guide the AI to something that actually looks good. Does anyone else get frustrated when people dismiss the time you put into picking the right settings and fixing the output?

2 comments

2 Comments

seth_green8527d agoMost Upvoted

Totally feel you on this. @hall.ruby I get where you're coming from but it's not that simple. Last week I spent a whole afternoon trying to get a cyberpunk street scene to look right. The AI kept giving me weird neon colors that clashed, so I had to swap between different model merges like 15 times just to get the mood I wanted. Then the character's hand came out looking like a claw so I had to inpaint that part over and over. By the time I matched the shadows and added rain streaks in photoshop it was a solid three hours of work. The AI is a tool but it's not just pushing a button.

hall.ruby1mo ago

Wouldn't saying it takes 2 hours of tweaking and then photoshop kind of prove their point though? The AI still does the core heavy lifting of actually painting the scene, the rest is just editing the results. If someone had to hand paint all that detail from scratch it would take days not hours.