That engineer at the coffee shop told me AI art is just fancy autocomplete

He said it like it was obvious, but it stuck with me for weeks. Has anyone else heard that comparison and actually thought about what it means for creativity?

2 comments

2 Comments

the_kim1mo ago

Wait, doesn't calling it autocomplete kinda miss the point? Autocomplete just finishes your sentences. AI art can generate whole new images from scratch. That's a different thing. The real question is what happens when millions of people can create stuff without traditional skills. Gatekeeping gets smashed. Creativity becomes about ideas, not technique. That's what scares people.

grantl941mo ago

I hear what you're saying about ideas over technique, but I see it a bit differently. In my experience, technique is part of how you figure out what your ideas even are. Like, when I'm drawing or painting by hand, the mistakes and limitations of my own skill force me to problem solve and discover stuff I wouldn't have thought of otherwise. Calling it just 'autocomplete' might be oversimplified, but there is something to that comparison. Autocomplete saves you time typing, but it doesn't teach you how to write a better sentence. With AI art, you skip the struggle and the process that usually helps you refine your taste and instincts over time. So yeah, gatekeeping can be bad, but I wonder if we lose something real when we bypass learning the hard parts.

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