this post was submitted on 08 Aug 2026
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Fuck AI

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Lime Bar @limebar@mastodon.social

I am a little shocked at the lack of solidarity I see between artists working in different mediums wrt genAI.

Musicians who would never use it to make music use it to make cover art

Graphic artists reach for it to make music over their videos

Writers use it to illustrate their articles

And, considering software development an art, many use it to create web sites or apps to host their art.

None of this is necessary. All of this is harmful to the other artists.

Collaborate ffs.

Stop it.

Aug 09, 2026, 12:17 AM

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[–] Jankatarch@lemmy.world 6 points 1 hour ago* (last edited 51 minutes ago)

See also: People who HATE AI, but still use it to make/upscale their "memes." Was somewhat common in reddit the "this is the only good use of AI" crowd.

[–] carotte@lemmy.blahaj.zone 9 points 2 hours ago (1 children)

it’s interesting how many creatives and professionals see ai as being perfectly able to replace anyone’s work who isn’t theirs, but unable to replace them. i remember seeing a post about storyboarders thinking ai was unfit for storyboards, but good for concept art, and concept artists thinking ai was unfit for concept art, but fine for storyboards.

everyone sees the value in their work, but many can’t see the value of other people’s work, and think an ai-generated approximation that’s "good enough" is fine to replace it… it’s kinda sad, really

the exception is software developers, who are more than eager to replace their own work with ai-generated garbage. i don’t know why so many software devs have so little respect for themselves and their work, but i can’t say i’m surprised honestly.

[–] skisnow@lemmy.ca 5 points 1 hour ago

Was going to post the same thing. It's not just the arts either, all branches of academia seem to be suffering from this.

i don’t know why so many software devs have so little respect for themselves and their work

A lot of the dev process is tedious as fuck. I've never met a developer who enjoys writing tests, for example. That plus Agile/kanban long since totally dehumanized the development process by treating devs as fungible engineering units.

[–] Cris_Citrus@piefed.zip 3 points 1 hour ago

If you don't follow limebar hes on peertube and his music fuckin slaps

[–] Keilik@lemmy.world 57 points 4 hours ago (4 children)

Could it be a symptom of everybody being broke af and not wanting to ask someone to work for exposure? Because a lot of artists are lucky enough to make enough money to cover their expenses for doing the art, let alone anything else.

I would love to see more collaborations and rejection of AI for everything but the tasks that are actually a decent use case (preliminary searches and compiling massive pools of data) and I think one of the best way to start is to just pay people a living wage.

[–] iamthetot@piefed.ca 3 points 33 minutes ago* (last edited 10 minutes ago)

My dream is to be a published author. I would sooner release a book with no art than use genAI art.

[–] earlgrey0@sh.itjust.works 20 points 4 hours ago (3 children)

With how bad AI art is, I kind of wish that artists would be ok letting their work stand on its own. Like does an album need a cover or an article graphics if it’s just the equivalent of visual static. It’s not really elevating the piece any, it’s just there to fill a void. Make it ok to have stand alone pieces again!

[–] eatCasserole@lemmy.world 4 points 1 hour ago

Exactly. The Beatles released an album with a blank white cover. It was brilliant. There's really no need to fill every space with slop.

[–] Keilik@lemmy.world 5 points 2 hours ago

The existence of AI art is currently the most convincing proof I have ever seen of the existence of the human soul.

[–] Funkt4st1c@lemmy.world 8 points 3 hours ago (2 children)

Yeah i mean ive seen some straight dogshit album covers for good music. Its not like the cover sells the thing anyways.

Royalty free music is pretty cheap to come by and coding isnt that difficult.

If you need a thing and cant pay for a thing, then learn to do the thing. A shit job is better than ai generated imho

[–] Dookieman12@piefed.social 2 points 20 minutes ago

coding isnt that difficult.

What programs have you written?

[–] earlgrey0@sh.itjust.works 5 points 3 hours ago

Seriously! I yearn for the old days of really crappy photoshop album covers! They’re at least an earnest expression of what the band is trying to convey

[–] solrize@lemmy.ml 8 points 3 hours ago

Can also be that people react badly to AI in areas where they have some knowledge and taste, but are too ignorant to care in other areas. I'm a prolific reader and (imho) an ok writer, so I'm revolted by AI slop in written text. But I'm a moron when it comes to art, so I'm I haven't been too bothered by AI art per se. Of course that it comes from chewing up and spitting out human artists' work is revolting too, but that's separate and more distant.

[–] Visstix@lemmy.world 17 points 4 hours ago

If I see an AI image for a song on spotify, there's a 90% the music is too.

[–] Antagnostic@lemmy.world 9 points 3 hours ago* (last edited 3 hours ago) (1 children)

Unfortunately I'm pessimistic it will ever happen. AI rewards you with what you want (or a mimic of it anyway) for not talking to people. Which feeds the largest insecurity all artists have, expressing themselves and connecting with others outside their art.

[–] terranoid@lemmy.cafe 7 points 2 hours ago

I think there is a real trap of not caring about the side to the product that you didn't create. I fell for this trap. I made music, used AI for cover art way before this conversation was happening and people were mad about data centers and all that, years ago now. People were mad that art was used to train it without their permission but the novelty of the thing was the loudest voice at the time.

Later I realized that AI cheapens your entire product, whatever it is. If I use AI for the cover art, people will think I used AI for the music (I didn't). I went back and did the art myself for everything I could to eliminate as much AI bullshit from my music, just so it wasn't giving people the wrong idea.

I think everyone is realizing this, AI just makes everything else look like slop. It's not a "neat" tool anymore. The novelty has been dead for at least a year. No one gives a fuck that you can generate Spiderman as ancient Japanese scroll art. Now it's just, "oh god some CEO is trying to push more slop".

It's not that people are always trying to be cheap or something. Sometimes they just want to focus on the core part of a project, like game devs the programming, musicians the music, painters the paint, animators the animation, etc. An animator isn't trying to avoid working with someone else or trying to avoid paying a musician. They just want to present their art and choose something that works with it. AI made it really easy to ask for literally anything, when normally people would scrape for CC0 license stuff. AI became the most convenient option to slap something else on it that fits the vibe you want. Now, it looks or sounds like shit, but honestly I think it was always about convenience.

[–] EmilieEasie@fedinsfw.app 9 points 4 hours ago

Ehhhh sorta? There's always been some cynical people who aren't really about the art. Like, I remember reading tutorials on how to churn out bullshit self-help books to make money on amazon before the LLM craze. They weren't really artists, and those are the people I mostly associate with using AI-generated book covers.

When it comes to games, the people using AI-generated assets are mostly the kinds of people who slopped together pre-made assets before, or would have, anyway.

There are some people who turned to the dark side so to speak but they're kinda the exception. AI is a pretty good marker of a trash product. Like, people who actually write well or make good games or music usually don't use Ai generated bullshit for their products.

[–] IAmYouButYouDontKnowYet@reddthat.com 9 points 4 hours ago (1 children)

I was thinking about something..

Like text books used to have illustrated artist rendition depictions of things. They weren't the real thing but people kind of accept them as the real thing in a way. I guess like ancient times and dinosaurs... A lot of how it's presented in artist rendition. But now Ai does it... So it like a photo copy of a photo copy. It adds another layer of not being real.

I started thinking about this because I did a search on YouTube recently and almost everything was ai created.

It's getting fucked up fast.

[–] OpenStars@discuss.online 3 points 4 hours ago

I see tons and tons of content not created by AI on YouTube, so not "everything". It might be a reflection of whatever you searched for.

[–] tenacious_mucus@sh.itjust.works 8 points 5 hours ago* (last edited 4 hours ago)

I have an old buddy who’s a pretty accomplished tattoo artist, and as goes is also a pretty good artist in many other ways- pen/ink, paint, etc. We have a few of his hand drawn or painted pieces hanging on our walls.

I saw sometime last year that he was proudly telling everyone about his AI art shop on Etsy…selling art he was just having AI generated and printed via whatever those shops that just print whatever you want on whatever you want and drop shipped to you. …so sad…

[–] SnailMagnitude@mander.xyz 8 points 5 hours ago