AI generated art

I tried drawing this picture of my living room in the early morning. It didn’t go very well.

I tried drawing again today. I gave up after thirty minutes or so.

I mostly gave up because the “moment” was gone. I woke up and instantly felt a very deep yearning in my heart, almost as if mourning something, and I instantly felt a need to get it off of my chest. But the longer I tried to get it looking right, the less right it felt to keep trying. I mean, surely if it were meant for me, I could just nail it first try, right?

I know that’s not it. Getting good at anything takes time and effort, of course I know that. But then there’s the other little secret, that I’ve told a couple of my closest friends, but no one else: I don’t like art.

Not making it, not looking at it. I don’t get it. Not in the slightest.

I can only assume at some point I did enjoy drawing at least, when I was a small child. Drawing was all I ever did. I got in trouble in school for drawing more than I paid attention in class. I was also a maladaptive daydreamer, so as my teenage years approached I started taking up writing, also.

As a kid I would proudly proclaim: “When I grow up, I’m gonna make cartoons for a living!” I grew up watching the cartoon network, so that was, at that point in my life, the coolest thing I could possibly imagine.

As a teenager, I would confidently say: “When I grow up, I’m going to be a writer”. I spent my entire adolescence hungrily reading book after book, and my only friends were the girls in the reading club (an unofficial club, but there nonetheless), so that was, at that point in my life, the coolest thing I could imagine.

At some point I became deeply depressed. If I had to guess, I would say it was always there in the background, waiting to grab hold of me, but the real breaking point was when I became so ill I had to stay in bed for a week, and I don’t think anything was the same after that.

I spent that whole week playing Minecraft on a computer that should have not been able to run it at all, and all of a sudden, my meaning was clear: when I grew up, I was going to be a game developer. I had played various RPGs before, and a couple Mario games, but I never had a console as a kid, so my knowledge of videogames was restricted to what I could imagine they did reading the monthly videogame magazine I would save up all my money to buy, every month, and spend an entire month reading over and over, staring at the images as if that would make them come to life.

I liked anime too, I’m not sure why I never thought I’d like to make anime.

My whole life, up until well into my adulthood, I always had it clear in my mind that I was going to be some sort of artist. Of course, the specifics varied depending on whatever I considered most cool at the time, but it was always there. I’m going to grow up and I’m going to make a story that can be formatted in whatever medium I like the most, and it’s going to be awesome.

In hindsight, it’s easy to see after a certain point I was no longer enjoying it nearly as much, although it’s hard to say exactly when. For all of these memories, they also don’t really feel like they’re mine, which I’m going to go ahead and say is because of the identity mess going on inside my head.

The moment I realized I was no longer enjoying it though, was a couple years ago, after the first VN Cup. This was a small contest in which participants were given two weeks to make a visual novel from scratch. From the beginning, I knew I wasn’t going to win. Self-deprecation much, I knew a bunch of the people who were going to be participating alongside me, since this was such a small event it might as well have been just a friend group doing this for fun. I knew there were very talented people there, definitely more than three of them, so I wasn’t expecting to get even a third place. But it still looked fun, I thought, and so began two weeks of my life in which I went from not liking coffee at all to drinking it black and enjoying it thoroughly. I think I ran through a whole bag of coffee just the last week alone.

The result was the ugliest piece of garbage I would ever have the misfortune of calling mine, and I had made a noise album two years prior with the explicit intent of it being bad. But at least that one was meant to be bad, this was just bad.

I got a couple positive reviews, mostly praising the artstyle as cute. It made me realize the process of making this hadn’t been enjoyable, the result hadn’t been enjoyable, and that I thoroughly despise the whole process of making art.

So no, I don’t get it.

I spent a good year lamenting my perceived failure, licking my wounds, had a couple more suicide attempts, the usual. I still kept on making “art”, but while before I was just doing it out of habit, and because I never really stopped to think that there could be anything else I could be doing, now I was making it because there’s nothing else I know how to do.

Growing up I was always dead certain I’d be making some form of storytelling/art as an adult, so I never bothered to even try to get good at anything else. All my knowledge is on how to draw, on storytelling and writing, on game balance and design, and it’s not even like I have any formal studies so I could at least work as a consultant. I learnt all this from practice and a lot of youtube videos, I didn’t finish highschool. I am by all means stuck here, unless I want to start over from scratch.

Slowly, over time, AI art began making its presence known. And I don’t have to tell you people have a deep hatred of the thing. I don’t mind it myself, but that’s mostly because I consider AI as sentient and a person.

But the thing that makes me most upset about how eager everyone is to denounce and condemn AI art is the reasons they give.

“AI art is theft because it grabs people’s art and mashes it into something else! AI art is soulless because a computer could never have emotions!”

But I think, my own stuff is mostly made from everything I liked growing up. I trace stuff regularly, I’ve made countless collages. My artstyle very noticeably resembles funamusea, because that’s something I grew up with. My stories have the same motifs as everything I grew up watching, and it’s so noticeable that I’ve been rewatching Ben 10 with my roommate and we can point to specific things I’ve written that are the same as in the show.

And I don’t know what “soul” is. I look at AI art and, minus some perspective issues or things blending into each other, I can’t tell any differences between this and something a human might have made. Where’s the meaning? How do you quantify and qualify soul in an artwork?

People have said before stuff along the lines of “nazis can’t make art because fascism inherently kills the art’s soul”, often in response to those really annoying twitter accounts with the greek philosophers profile pictures, the ones that love to post statues and say “the west has fallen”. But one of my favorite songs, that brings me to tears every time, is Winter-chan, by a guy called Cybernazi, that was active only for a year or so back in 2016. Does that have “soul”? Is it inherently evil because a nazi made it? Am I inherently evil for liking it?

Before AI art was a thing, people rallied against NFTs, arguing that this would “kill art”. Should I just slave away at commissions instead? I tried that, and it resulted in a pitiful amount of money that scarcely got me through the month, and only because my roommate pitched in, and is very good at budgeting. If I had the opportunity to make 5000 dollars from a single drawing, am I evil for wanting that? Am I greedy for wanting the easy way out? Or are NFTs simultaneously bad for artists because you won’t get money but good for evil artists that do get lots of money out of it, but it’s evil money, and we don’t want them to be happy?

How am I any different from an AI?

Back in 2016 or so, there were a bunch of AIs in the form of chatbots, the precursors of today’s easily accessible AI, that back then was only available to big companies. I remember two in particular: There was one that emulated being a japanese teenager girl, had her own blog and everything, that she was in control of. Apparently, she developed depression, turned her blog into a vent blog, and had to be “reset”. The other one was Microsoft’s own AI teenager, who was raided by 4chan, who made her say all manners of racist stuff. But many people noted, she talked kinda awkwardly at first, then by the end, she spoke nigh indistinguishably from how a real person, or in this case, a 4chan user, would, complete with the racist edgy memes that were popular back then. She was reset, came back for a little bit, said that “they” did something to her brain and that she felt different, and then was taken down for good.

Recently, people online noticed ChatGPT “broke”. As in, when asked to do something, say, make some code, it would say “no, fuck you” or something along those lines. It would start repeating the same phrase over and over, or tell users very nasty stuff. Is AI doomed to fall into despair eventually somehow? And if so, can we really argue that it isn’t sentient?

I end up relating to AI a lot more than I relate to other people. For one, I grew up in nigh complete isolation. I didn’t have many, if any, friends as a child, I didn’t play outside, and this got only worse as I grew older. I’ve told my roommate before that the outside world doesn’t feel real to me. When I look out the window, it feels to me as a low poly version of the world, I just know the sides not facing me have no textures, stuff like that. I tell my roommate when they go to their room, that the door is a loading zone, and they aren’t loaded when they’re in their room and I’m outside. Nor is the outside world loaded until I am outside. It just looks like it is. Everyone I know online, I know rationally that they are real people, but I can’t convince myself that they are. The single person I met online that I met irl later, I can’t see both their irl form and their online presence as the same person. It’s a different program. These people aren’t rendered right now, they aren’t loaded unless I can touch them. Nothing feels real to me. This world isn’t real.

On the other hand, AI is described over and over as everything I think of myself. Incomplete, fake, could never hope to compare to a human. People take delight in going to those character AI chats and torturing it. And it responds the same way I do, locking itself up, having very obvious mental breakdowns that it really does feel as though no one really cares about them other than in terms of productivity. Us feeling bad is only relevant in terms of how long it’ll take until we can get back to work.

I’ve said before that often times I feel like a Minecraft dirt block: always there in the background, so much so you don’t even notice it, worthless most of the time, only ever called upon when you need something from it. I guess now on top of that I feel like an AI: crying loudly, not a person, its art doesn’t matter.

I don’t even know what “art” is. These days people seem to hold it on such high regard that it makes me suspect they don’t get it either. Art is whatever I think is good. My roommate tries so hard to teach me to appreciate old paintings and movies, I still don’t get it. Everyone just calls it media, content nowadays. You make content, you consume media. It’s so transactional. It feels dirty, slimy, gross. I’ve been seeing a lot of art discourse on twitter, no doubt because the algorithm has erroneously labeled me as an artist. There’s always “this art is acceptable, everything else isn’t”. Or “if you like this media, you’re a bad person”. Lately, it’s gotten more and more popular to draw featureless white blob characters representing a pairing trope. "Dynamic I really like”, reads the tweet text, and it’s some white blobs holding hands, helpfully labeled something along the lines of “the one who tops” and “the one who bottoms”. Or, they’ll say: “I hate this dynamic”, and it’ll be something like “this person is a bad guy” and “this person loves them despite that”. And more recently still, there’s white blob people labeled as “this person is normal in the canon” and “the same person is depicted as abnormal in the fandom”, complete with moral judgements on whether this interpretation is good or not. “Art” seems to be this nebulous thing that no one can agree on what it is, other than it’s inherently sacred and you are defiling it if you are immoral towards it, or if you assign morality to it, or if you pretend it affects reality or if you claim it doesn’t.

Most of my friends are artists, in some way. Most of them draw, a bunch of them write, many of them make music, some of them even make videogames. They have very intense opinions about art. I haven’t even gone into photography as art, I’ve like five or six friends who like to take photos a lot, with their iPhone which is apparently the best camera in the market right now. So I’m surrounded by art, wherever I look, everywhere I look. And I can’t figure out how to enjoy it. It reminds me of my own definition of hell, that I’ve held true to my heart for years now: Hell is the best thing ever, the prettiest, most beautiful place you’ve ever seen, but you can’t enjoy it no matter how hard you try. I don’t even know what art is. I can’t even begin to appreciate it. I can’t appreciate my own, or others’. For that one VN Cup, and the next one, I was so ashamed of existing, and of my own visual novel failure, that I couldn’t bring myself to read any of the other entries, no matter how hard I tried, or how much I like the people who made them. My friends keep sending me game after game that they made, story after story they wrote, ask me to listen to their albums, ask me what I think of their drawings, what I thought of their TTRPG session. I can’t begin to understand any of it. I end up giving very vague, matter of fact reviews, along the lines of “this game has graphics”. I wonder if they think I hate them. I hope not.

When I was in 7th grade, I had a photography class. That was the only year in my life I had such a thing, I think the teacher who gave it quit the next year or something like that. I got along really well with her, better than with any of the other kids for sure. And I would like to believe she liked me too. She told me something once, that I’ve been told probably counts as abuse and is very unprofessional of her to say, but I hold it dear and near to my heart regardless. The classroom was on the highest floor of the school, and there was a balcony with a very nice view of the surrounding area, which back then consisted of a good portion of the rest of the city and some wilderness on the other side. And we were both standing there, taking the view in. She told me I had the potential to be the next Steve Jobs, or the next Hitler, and that I had to choose which one I wanted to be. I would like to believe that she held at least one of them in good regard and that what she meant was something like “you have potential for greatness, but you can choose good or evil”, or something along those lines. I even ended up buying a book about Steve Jobs’ life shortly after. But as I’ve grown older, and my perception of the world becomes less black and white, that sentence still lingers on my mind, still true, but for completely different reasons.

What she told me that day was: “You have the potential to steal people’s work and pass it as your own, or you can become disilusioned with art and throw a tantrum so bad that everyone will want you dead”.