And when I watch AI videos, I get the sense that the people making these things are unable to come up with anything genuinely clever beyond the feat itself

I also feel this way when watching a certain kind of show, where the process seems to have been to write a premise that checks off various boxes, and then the outline was handed to someone else to fill in the blanks, as if all the details are an afterthought, and are fundamentally disconnected from each other. Makes watching it feel like an empty waste of time. Sometimes it seems like it could be good at first, but once you see enough of it to tell, there’s that retroactive disappointment.

Someone once told me that art is like emotional nutrition. That made sense to me. Art feeds my feelings. And if that’s the case, consuming AI art is like eating styrofoam.

This comic essay goes on to say that the reason for this is that it’s not authentic, and what the author went through to produce art is what gives it nutritional value. I don’t think that’s quite right, because this is broader than just art and what an artist is trying to say, it’s a property of all information we consume; we need it, and we want it to be good, not bland and empty and the same as everything else, not irrelevant to our lives. People intentionally communicating their genuine experiences to you through long practice and consideration is something that often meets the bar, but so is a sunset or an animal doing something cute or an unidentified noise outside.

I think what’s being described here, something I personally dislike about a lot of AI content online, is something like an equivalent of symbol drawing. You can tell what the person who put it together had in mind, and also that probably not much thought was put into how to depict it beyond generic standards of quality. So there’s all this space where information could be conveyed, but it’s obvious that it’s effectively just noise and only there to look impressive, and because of the disconnect you’re basically mentally obligated to only consider the barebones concept. This is made worse and more glaring when it looks exactly like all the other similar AI images and videos.

Which is a shame because it doesn’t have to be like that. More effort, creativity, and playing off what the tool is producing makes it not bad to look at imo. So does going the other direction and letting AI output be its own thing rather than a representation of your thought. I still have an image I generated years ago with Disco Diffusion framed on my wall, it’s really abstract and barely looks like the prompt but it still is really cool to me because a human being would not have made something that looks like that.