EDIT :

So by your own admission skill is what makes art art.

Absolutely. if that's what it gets to discredit the fucking banana tape guy, hell yeah. Fuck all of those people, the basketball guy too.

END EDIT

Typing “make a picture of a banana taped to a wall” into an text box has skill?

here's the thing that AI haters don't get. You can just do that sure, but you can also put more effort into it, spend time crafting specific Loras and even input visual outlines as starting points. You can also do commonly accepted things to the image after, color correction, edits, shading etc etc. You can write more vivid descriptions to further hone what you are getting the machine to make.

And as I said before : books are just text written on a typewriter/word processor. We haven't disawoved literature as an art form just yet.

but that’s exactly the point of the AI slop machines; an attempt to demonetize a skill and save money for businesses.

Yeah, that's a downside when used in an industrial sense. I would prefer coca cola to pay out the ass for anything they do, instead of paying a modicum. But the topic we're discussing here isn't the next cola ad, it's shitposts. I'm pretty sure that taking time to crudely photoshop a strawberry elephant is just as valid an expression of a shitpost as putting in "Strawberry textured elephant" into a generative ai.

You could probably also do it by searching for a free use elephant model and free to use strawberry texture and combining the two in blender to get the same shitpost.

At the end of the day,it's a fucking shitpost. It doesn't matter. You're just pushing out a concept, not trying to win the prize for best artist.

I feel like you’re arguing to argue at this point and doing a very poor job.

The point is that 1) "Indie" use of generative AI for shitposts doesn't make the creator deserve crucifixion 2) Generative AI is a valid use case for talentless people who want to communicate a visual idea 3) The art world has set themselves up for this fucking argument for too long with the goddamn basketballs in folmadehyde and bananas duct taped to walls, while actually talented artists get ignored. It's the same fucking thing with music. The greatest composers of our time are slaving away at generic jobs to make ends meet, and risking going bankrupt every time they tour. All the attention goes to shitty pop musicians, and slop made by boardrooms and focus testing. The stuff being produced already had no soul.

Sidenote : I still have no fucking idea how Igorrr is making ends meet while creating the best music known to recorded history.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BMAPWtAqpbg