LIPS AND ASSHOLES, ALL THE WAY DOWN
AN ARGUMENT AGAINST AI IMAGE GENERATION
I was inspired to write this after trying to find new art on my Instagram search page and was overwhelmed by the sheer amount of AI stuff that I saw. Please forgive me for what could be seen as an OLD MAN YELLS AT CLOUD moment here. Y’all are entitled to your own opinion and this is mine so I totally understand if you don’t want to read another person going off on AI image generation. I promise that the next one of these will be back to the usual.
EJM
I hate joining the bandwagon but I’ve hit the point where I can no longer abide AI image generation.
I’m not going to lie, I tried a couple image generators early on and found them to be a fun novelty and an interesting time killer but couldn't see myself falling fully into that rabbit hole and hanging up my pens to think up keywords in different combinations all day instead.Â
An entire culture of creators has popped up since then and you can't seem to go anywhere online without having to interact with the faithful devotees of AI image generation or their products. I wanted to ignore them and this entire fad but their judgmental screeds of progress without necessary accountability and innovation without consequences have become too much for me.
I could start by going into all the moral and ethical reasons why I abhor these image generation systems but that has been done, over and over again, by people much smarter and eloquent than myself. Instead I want to share with you what seeing an overabundance of these snapshots from uncanny valley evokes in me and paint a picture of what I think we are doing to our humanity and imaginal ecosystems when we embrace the automation of art.
In 2012, ABC News did a series about the growing popularity of a food additive they called Pink Slime. Pink slime, otherwise known as finely textured beef, is a meat by-product created by removing all fat from otherwise useless meat trimmings through heat and centrifuges. The results of that process are then treated with ammonia or citric acid to kill bacteria. It's used mostly as filler for ground beef or as a standalone processed foodstuff. It derived its nickname because of its telltale color and texture.
I remember a time when there was an open debate about pink slime and its use in school cafeterias and prisons. Its nutritional value and hazards to the health and safety of consumers were brought into question due to media attention and was subsequently banned in both Canada and the EU because of the presence of ammonia but was still approved for limited human consumption by the USDA in America before getting reclassified as regular ground beef through corporate chicanery.
This kind of thing is nothing new. It's how industrialized farming maximizes profits while minimizing waste. It's also how you get Oscar Meyer wieners on every table while a good cut of meat stays just out of reach to the poorer consumers. It's capitalism at the expense of health and nutrition but packaged as a benefit instead of a hazard.Â
You can look to things like the average hot dog, SPAM, or the slurry that becomes a chicken nugget to find similar rendering processes that use every bit of meat from livestock and transform foods from a mindful relationship with what fuels the body into more of an abstract concept of perfunctory mastication with an acceptable level of potential harm. It's nourishment at its lowest level of potency and quality.
That isn't what we're sold, though. Corporate interests spend millions upon millions of dollars every year to push the illusion that this is the ideal way our food can be delivered to our tables and into our mouths.Â
Beef Products, Inc., or BPI, mounted an immense campaign to reform the image of pink slime, deploying a team of Republican politicians that they had provided heavy funding for to spread their approved rhetoric that the foodstuff was safe and helped keep the price of beef down, mounting a publicity tour with the slogan "Dude, it's beef!" When this didn't work out as planned BPI sued ABC News and resubmitted their product so that it could be classified and hidden away from angry or frightened consumers.
Pink slime is now a standard additive in ground beef and is put into seventy percent of the meat on our store shelves. It's just another forgotten controversy on a long list of compromises we have to make to live in the world as it is now.
To me there is nothing in the tangible world that provides a better metaphor for AI image generation than pink slime.Â
It is my belief that art is sustenance. It feeds our minds and spirits, seeding our own imaginations and inner landscapes. It's a window into the worlds of those around us and lets us peer into their emotions and existences. Art that is prepared by passionate hands is a meal that both fortifies and delights while engaging both the palate and the heart. To find art that is resonant is an experience that is seared into the halls of memory and marks you indelibly.
Like pink slime or hotdogs, AI images are nothing but lips and assholes. It's creativity that has been stripped down for parts, processed, and rendered into content without soul, skill, or intention. AI images will never be better than a foodstuff, processed and packaged without care or spirit, heated up, and unceremoniously thrown on a plate. Sure, it tastes like food and fills you up but it serves as nothing more than empty calories to be digested before being shit out and replaced by more of the same.
An AI scours for images fitting certain keywords before assembling them to create the most efficient image to fit the desired effect. It's cold and mechanical and it's why comparing AI generated creation to sample-based music, drum machines, digital art, or collage is completely off the mark. Those see the component pieces chosen by a skilled hand for a specific purpose while the other throws all tangentially related images into a digital meat grinder. It's as passive as using a search engine and removes the burden of resonance from the creator to place it firmly on the audience, leaving them to pull meaning from the flow of the keyword slop the creator has produced for their AI sluice.
At some point these algorithms stop being the democratization of art and become a homogenization of it. Even though different keywords are used by many users, the images all have incredibly similar qualities and styles. The creation of one user is nearly indiscernible from that of another. Like highway sprawl littered with signs for McDonald's, Arby's, and Taco Bell on an endless repeat, AI gentrifies the art space and paves over those of us hoping to make our way doing something different. It is art at its most industrialized and insulating.
Like the companies who render pink slime, part of the problem with AI image generation revolves around who benefits from these ruthless forms of creation and who makes the money from the mechanical stripping of every usable ounce of flesh that can be found in art that can be found online. It certainly isn't the artist whose work has been ground up and turned into digital slurry without consent or credit and it isn't the users of these AI platforms who are testing and training the algorithms in trade for a shiny new toy to play with.
Stability AI, the creator of the Stable Diffusion generator that some of the more popular image services have been built upon, has certainly done okay for themselves. Though Stability AI is a non-profit organization they have been able to monetize some of their product lines while taking full advantage of the benefits of their status and received a financial injection of one billion dollars from a group of investors in October of 2022 after already getting one hundred and one million dollars from a previous round of financing. If you investigate further into almost any of the most popular AI image generation platforms you'll find very similar stories of money, money, and even more money flowing in for the companies in charge.
Why would this happen if they're just making free or cheap tools for people to play around with? You would have to be naïve to think that this is all being created and distributed for altruistic reasons. In all probability it's because an AI doesn't ask for pay or benefits so it doesn't cost them a thing to keep giving you exactly the content you desire when you absently scroll your social media feed while they reap the benefits of your use of their product. It's automation for the sake of data collection and shows them just how little they need to give you to get all the information they could ever require to make their algorithms more robust and all encompassing. In almost every case the original artists won't get pay or licensing for what's been sampled and most AI image generators can't get around laws that strip any claim of ownership from their users so the corporations and their investors gather the entirety of the vast bounty.
"Let them eat finely textured beef," they say, "if that's all they're going to ask for! Another round of lips and assholes for everyone!"
At some point we have to learn where to draw the line.Â
Commercial art has been around for a long, long time but industrialized art has not and we don't need to agree that it's necessary. We lost grip on food production, housing, and our natural resources so long ago that none of us know a world where it hasn't been this way but until recently art has still belonged to us.
I understand that this opinion might get me labeled as a luddite with my head buried in the past for not embracing the new technology but I want to ask these two main questions for those who simply see AI as a new tool to create art:
Why would you embrace a tool that further flattens the human landscape?Â
The AI makes all the choices for you no matter how you choose or arrange your keywords. It picks the colors, the shapes, the sourced material, and its composition. There is nothing human in the output and you are left to compromise with the AI as to which picture most closely approximates a desired effect and that harsh truth is what brings me directly to my next question.Â
Does a tool remain a tool when it makes choices for itself?Â
A tool, by definition, merely enhances or enables a human to use their own skills or abilities in a more effective way. Automation is only a tool by the standard of human replacement, not enhancement.Â
In factories, automation is a tool that is used by the corporation, not the worker, to replace humans and make their production more efficient or cost effective. It's the very opposite of a HUMAN tool. It's the same in food production, coding, or any other field where automation has put people out of work.Â
One could argue that these are jobs people didn't want to do in the first place but our acceptance of the practice has given corporations more leverage over all fields of labor with the threat of human replacement and these image generators are giving them the same leverage over our creative endeavors.Â
I guess that's really a long winded way of coming to my final point.Â
Does AI make you the artist or are you simply a tool used by what has replaced the artist?Â
There are so many more unanswered questions left to ask when it comes to AI image generation.
Are we handing over a part of what makes us human just because it's shiny and new?
Are we just assuaging our guilt for enjoying a thing derived by engineers who found a solution to a problem that never truly existed by calling it innovation instead of exploitation or unethical extraction?
I feel like I've hardly scratched the surface of why all of this feels dangerous or selfish instead of exciting.Â
What I know with absolute certainty is that I'm tired.
I'm tired of being told that I can't be angry at a new technology when it's reached a level of consensus acceptance.
I'm tired of hearing the faithful preach that it’s all innocence and exploration while trying to drown out criticism with straw-men and insults.
I'm tired of being told that it's inevitable when nothing ever truly is unless we roll over and allow it to be.
I'm tired of being told that it's THE future and that we lack any choice in the matter because the cat's already out of the bag.
And finally I'm tired of being asked to hold my nose and choke back this particular bit of pink slime. The taste has become too much for me. It's time to overcome this unpalatable collection of lips and assholes by getting my own hands dirty and making some goddamn art. I hope that you do the same.