Image generators democratize the production of art, not the making of art

If this is democratizing art, it’s neoliberal democracy, where the means of production are outsourced, labor is commodified, and the platform is captured by private interest before you walk in the door. Compared to that, spraypainting a dick on the side of a bridge is the French Revolution.

“Whenever I hear people talking about ‘democratizing access’ and ‘transparency,’ I get worried,” said Grubaugh. “What that usually means is that the big companies are helping themselves to our data and using it for their benefit.”

Production is in the interest of people who deal in products. Plenty of materials and institutions already exist to get from a brief to an art product more quickly. Many of them helped OpenAI make art products more quickly. [link to stock/getty image stuff]

I would argue that speed is the main selling point of these image generators if you are selling them to people who want image-products. Their marketable feature is that they remove the [[ human hand ]] from the production stage of image creation, but for two reasons. One is if you don’t want to pay a human to make you an image, and the other is if you need images faster than a human can make them. Regardless, speed is primary, as its relationship to cost also makes it a factor in the don’t-pay-humans point. There may have been a brief period of time where image generators were also being marketed on the claim that the decision-making and idea-generating parts of image production were also being handled by a non-human, but given the move towards “accurately” rendering an image to satisfy a prompt, I no longer think this is the case.

As many artists have already realized, if you are someone who cares about making images and thinking about how they fit into the world, the speed of machine generated images is not primarily for you. Having more images to react to, faster, does not necessarily help you [do theory faster]. It just gives you more theory to do, on more and more complex images, hence the endless AI-thinkpieces about AI art. The speed offered by image generators is more for the people who have a greater interest in the brokerage of images than the making of or experiencing of images. But it is most for the people who own the platforms where the wheels are spinning. They make their money on the churn, not the product, [just like an art school.]