alt Hacker NewsI go to a lot of craft fairs and I've been seeing people using AI to make their banners or book covers or detail designs on mugs and such. Here are people playing a "support local creators" line and they won't support their own local graphic designers.
There was one booth two shows ago that I particularly remember as it was selling "paintings" of pastoral scenes and wild life, "painted" on to log slices. This is a fairly common craft you might see at such events, but this particular booth was gluing an AI generated image printed on some kind of paper and then slapping it with a coat of texturing medium to give it a paint brush effect.
Disgusting. Selfish. Dishonest. Churlish. This is what craft is becoming. A pink sludge chicken mcnugget of cynical capitalist exploitation.
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I am a 3D printing maker type nerd (I make my own tools for other creative tasks, rather than as their own outcomes) and I saw an incredible youtube video about 3D printed (flexi-dragon etc.) slop at US craft fairs.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zbDPzHLDjYY
She is so exasperated by it that she's unable to draw a conclusion, and I think that is actually the biggest problem with creative dishonesty on this scale. It is numbing.
Everyone knows that it is happening, everyone is clear that it is bad. But there is a paradox: serious-minded artists do use tools, of course. They also have an instinct about ways tool use would be dishonest. But they are introspective and they are often aware that their pragmatic use of a tool might be another's dishonesty. And they want to be inclusive, to build their "scene".
So actually there is less speaking out about it directly than there might be. And what that enables is this ever worsening bad-faith use of low-effort tools. The fact that the people selling the flexi dragons at craft fairs just bought them in bulk on Temu is the hilarious exasperating end point of it.
I think AI has made it more urgent for artists to speak out, sooner.
It has made me even more acutely aware that even though I make my own tools for my own creative projects (lo-fi and niche photographic tools, mostly), the fact that bits are 3D printed is probably interesting only to me or to others who want to make their own tools for their own work; the fact that CAD and 3D printing liberated my idea from its prison in my brain is something I must not let myself think is an end goal. The end goal is elsewhere.
Why do you care? If it's bad people won't buy it. If people buy it, it's only bad to you