Showerthought: AI art models are basically just really fancy collage artists trained on 5 billion images.

I spent last Tuesday testing Stable Diffusion 3.5 against Midjourney for a client project and realized the output is only as good as the data, so why do we call it creativity when it's just remixing faster than we can?

3 comments

3 Comments

wadejenkins16d ago

Treated it like learning to swing a hammer right, repetition teaches you more than any shortcut ever will.

wells.evan16d ago

Man, EXACTLY right. It's the same pattern you see everywhere now - people calling something "creative" or "artistic" just because it's fast and loud. I saw a kid at a restaurant the other day bragging about "making" a picture on his tablet, but all he did was type a sentence and get a finished image in 5 seconds. That's not making anything, that's just ordering from a menu. Same with those text generators that write essays for students. We're confusing the ABILITY to produce something quickly with the actual act of thinking through it and making choices. It's like saying a microwave is a chef because it heats up food fast. The real work is in the process, the mistakes, the starting over - not just hitting "generate" and calling it a day.

aaronroberts16d ago

Something nobody is talking about is how this is actually changing what we value in people. We used to admire someone who could draw from scratch or write a thoughtful paper because it showed PATIENCE and dedication. Now we're teaching kids that the best skill is knowing what to ask for, not how to make it yourself. That's going to mess up how we see hard work down the line. It's like judging a musician by how fast they can pick a song on a jukebox instead of how well they play an instrument. The real loss isn't just about the final product, it's about losing the ability to struggle through something and come out better on the other side.

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