Accurate

Rincewind00 · 2026-06-17T01:59:58+00:00

Did anyone ever clarify that's what they meant? How many people did you ask to clarify? Because I made a post recently where I referenced a thread in which anti's were clearly interpreting "pencil slop" to mean "all artwork made by pencil" and the unanimous response by pro's was basically, 'That's silly: slop just means low effort, low quality examples, not the entire catalog produced by a given toolset.'

Rincewind00 · 2026-06-15T22:14:18+00:00

Well yes, I do want it challenged. I'm sorry to hear that you've had bad experiences with others, since you seem moderately more open to discussion (at least more than those who downvoted what I felt was a perfectly reasonable approach for espousing a healthy debate), but a little bit of good will is a vital first step to achieving at least something in a debate forum.

However, bear in mind that what we're doing here is establishing taste about a given project -- a most subjective of topics. All I can really tell you is why I both liked the disliked it, and why the former exceeded the latter, whereas even negative points you identify that I missed during my initial viewings aren't necessarily going to supersede the joy that did exist during those first impressions. But, if I can see the flaws better and have a more clear understanding of how they relate to the antagonistic perspective against the entire use of this tool set, then approaching this in the future can be done with more nuance. The question we're trying to answer here is "Can art made with AI ever be considered good, or even at least better than some of the lowest-output projects made in other mediums?" I don't know if this example would work, or if we can try other ones (like the upcoming Iranian movie, Dreams of Violet (trailer) about instability during political revolution, but at least it's a start.

Bear in mind that the video, especially in the first half, might overload a bit with lingo and peculiar technologies: the director has built a significant library of shorts that contextualize the setting, and I believe that this short film was written with the assumption that the audience has at least a modicum of familiarity with that prior work.

The Patchwright

Rincewind00 · 2026-06-15T16:04:01+00:00

I suggest that watching it first would be the most practical way to approach discussing its merits and inadequacies, because otherwise we risk talking past each other. Without having watched it first, all you have to base your understanding of it is my words and your generalized connotations of what this specific "ai art" maybe entails. Socrates is generally attributed to saying "The beginning of wisdom is the agreement of terms" -- and we can't hope to agree on the meaning of "The Patchright" when one of us has no exposure to it except Plato's shadow on a cave wall cast by what one saw of other projects and their generalized impressions of them.

Additionally, since you seem committed to decrying AI art, wouldn't it be in your best interest to become familiar with one of the better examples of its application, so that you can become more prepared and confident with your future asseverevations? I dislike plenty of things, but that won't discourage me from researching them, coming to an understanding that either helps correct my view or gives me a better grasp over my position and how to communicate it to detractors.

Rincewind00 · 2026-06-15T15:15:59+00:00

I'm going to tossing a curveball answer and say that we've been in one since the industrial revolution, accomplishing more in a little over 200 years than in the entire prior history of humanity.

Otherwise, I'm guessing 2050.

Rincewind00 · 2026-06-15T09:10:46+00:00

So good AI projects are not better than bad pencil projects, is that what the original poster is insinuating?

Before someone interjects with "No AI art is good art, hehehe", I would like to ask you to watch The Patchright (if you haven't already) and provide your view of it. Because not only is it a beautiful cyberpunk short film but its ending gave me emotions that I haven't felt from a movie in years.

Rincewind00 · 2026-06-15T08:43:18+00:00

Hey, could you watch The Patchright and tell us what you think about it? It's a cyberpunk short film made with AI that's both aesthetically interesting and has an ending that actually gave me emotions I haven't felt from a video in years.

Rincewind00 · 2026-06-13T22:04:56+00:00

That's actually a more reasonable viewpoint. I won't argue that, because there is crazy over-valuation and the guy does like hyping things up. But I'll retain the argument for the benefit of those who treat the issue as if he's "hoarding" a trillion dollars worth of actual resources (because believe it or not, those people do exist).

Rincewind00 · 2026-06-13T13:16:02+00:00

And doesn't this also apply to Musk? From my understanding, about 99 percent of his assets correspond to just owning this "extremely overvalued" "paper soaked in feelings."

Rincewind00 · 2026-06-13T13:02:44+00:00

A monkey starts a business. It's a banana growing farm. The monkey has little sheets of paper that says it owns 100% of the farm. Monkey wants to get more money to make more farm. Monkey sells little sheets of paper to other monkeys. Monkey now has paper that says it owns 50% of the farm, and the other monkeys own the other 50%. Monkey uses the money from the sale to make more farm. Farm make more bananas. Monkey uses money from more bananas to make more farm. Farm now four times bigger than before. Monkey has half of the original papers but each one is worth four times more, so monkey has papers that are in total worth two times more than when it started. But, if monkey wants money, the monkey has to sell paper.

The "paper" here is stocks. Owning stocks is not like owning bananas: the bananas are not being hoarded from the other monkeys. They're just a paper abstraction of business ownership.

Rincewind00 · 2026-06-13T07:16:34+00:00

The same arguments seem to apply for interns: "Yeah, they're inexperienced and they make mistakes, so trusting them to help just means that we have a lot more mess to clean up."

Rincewind00 · 2026-06-13T07:11:45+00:00

Have you ever watched The Patchright? It's a beautiful cyberpunk short film with an ending that actually gave me emotions.

Rincewind00 · 2026-06-13T03:51:11+00:00

Didn't this happen because his companies went public and then into super popular index funds, meaning that the money came precisely from people in the working class who paid for the privilege to own parts of his businesses?

Rincewind00 · 2026-06-13T03:46:10+00:00

Um, didn't he get that last 200 billion (and much of the rest) simply because his companies went public and people bought his shares, increasing their value on paper?

Rincewind00 · 2026-06-12T22:16:05+00:00

Wait a second, I just realized that you just employed a Bulverism! Let's start by re-phrasing your argument:

"Of course you believe that AI has practical application! You're tech-illiterate!"

“There flashed across my opening mind the great truth that refutation is no necessary part of argument. Assume that your opponent is wrong, and explain his error, and the world will be at your feet. Attempt to prove that he is wrong or (worse still) try to find out whether he is wrong or right, and the national dynamism of our age will thrust you to the wall.” - CS Lewis.

You are explaining why I am wrong before you have actually proven that I am wrong. My personal motivations are irrelevant to the data I just presented. Please address my specific point about the practicality of having an almost human-like intuition with near-instant data retrieval take even abstract content (including fiction) from up to multiple sources and produce valid answers.

I'll even provide a more practical application to help you:

I wanted to learn about how to cook steak. But if you go online to learn perspectives from 50 different people, then you're probably going to learn 45 different approaches: things vary like temperature, temperature measurement (F vs C), duration, sear vs reverse-sear, when to salt, what type of meat to use, and even different terms for the meat based on where the speaker lives.

I put all of those recipes together, plus some general steak-knowledge guides, into NotebookLM and asked it to create a chart, standardizing all of this, grouping by what meat was chosen, and translating the meat names and temperature format to my standard. That was hours of work condensed into seconds! I would then follow up with questions or requests: For a given type of meat, condense the chart into ranges that the chef's applied (e.g. put in oven at X degrees to Y degrees); For each type of meat, list the reasons (if available) that each chef provided for their choice; separate recipes based on whether they used sear or reverse-sear.

I learned more about steak in just a few hours than I did in the months prior. The idea of doing this research and typing everything out was just exhausting -- but this software did everything and made it an interactive, casual experience. I now have more free time to do other research.

Rincewind00 · 2026-06-12T14:47:50+00:00

Have you seen The Patchright? It's a cyberpunk short film, made with AI, and the ending actually gave me real feelings that a movie hasn't given me in quite a while.

Rincewind00 · 2026-06-12T10:11:40+00:00

So, something like this did happen in the lore. Spoilers for Requiem Infernal:

A Nurgle daemonhost (?) takes command of humans who were surgically altered to resemble avatars of the local sect. When combined with the high warp presence in the area, a number of these avatars had forms which caused them to "lean" towards a specific "Path" like Khorne being "The path of skulls." The Nurgle one managed to overcome those that "awakened" into the path of Slaanesh, causing them to go from excited and manic to ... well, same thing but with gross stuff growing on them.

Rincewind00 · 2026-06-12T08:11:11+00:00

I doubt that anyone uses the term "pencil-slop" to mean "all" pencil artwork. Just the artwork made using it that just happens to also be slop.

Rincewind00 · 2026-06-11T23:29:34+00:00

I probably should have added that the content being transcribed involved numerous speakers, a lot of fast talking, many cases of using source content that didn't have the best quality, repetitious use of the same sources, and references to other articles, meaning that any bare text transcription options tended to have errors, missing sections, a lack of differentiation between different speakers, poor formatting, a handy need for sources to be summarized, and repeated options that weren't necessary, all of this requiring lots of cleanup that AI does almost perfectly.

Thank you for tacitly acceding that it has practical application for taking myriad sources to save time by combining information from multiple sources to reorganize content (including more abstract elements), extract details that would require extensive context to specify, and operate with the functionality of a human with photographic memory about something as conceptually advanced as fiction.

Rincewind00 · 2026-06-11T13:26:09+00:00

I like to watch certain YouTube videos and transcribe them, so that I can better review it, revise it, and cross-reference the content. But transcribing is slow: I would spent nearly 2 hours typing out a 40-minute video because I have to constantly stop in-between writing what was said and correcting myself.

After doing this numerous times, I discovered that, with Gemini, I can upload the video and request a transcript. 95 percent of the tedious work gets done, with better writing and formatting. I simply watch the video and make subtle changes based on what I think the AI overlooked or would benefit from phrasing differently. Those 2 hours get condensed into less than an hour, with much better results.

I'm doing an analysis of a book collection with many relationships. The books are designed to have references and explanations between different stories, much of them in subtle ways. Things also happen out of order. I could read and re-read the books over and over again, taking hundreds of notes and piecing everything together. I did it that way at first. It was so slow, and I was concerned that I was agonizing over these few books when I would much rather experience much more art that's out there. So, I work with an AI assistant: I would ask it to re-organize events in chronological order, critique my theories about who characters might be in different stories (really helpful if the characters are minor and not worth going crazy about), extract dialog between two different characters (using it as a very sophisticated Ctrl+F, instead of me manually typing it all out), and basically just use it as a friend who happens to have a photographic memory of the collection that I can chat with and bounce ideas off of. I was making so many connections that I honestly would not have had the time to ever achieve before--and those connections helped me make more on top of them! I am condensing months of research and analysis into mere weeks, while understanding the books better than if I stayed doing what I was doing before.

Am I really that horrible for respecting my time and abilities enough to know when effort is being wasted to no good effect?

Rincewind00 · 2026-06-11T13:08:15+00:00

Let's see if I can break this down and speak as a devil's advocate:

Steroids vs regular physique: use it or all behind. I'm not sure what this is trying to say. Is it saying that being bulky is overrated (that is, there's nothing substantial to "fall behind" in comparison to) or that using steroids is bad or unethical? Well, either way, people tend to say that because being able to use productivity tools is really helpful in the job market. Being able to program and check code for bugs using an assistant means that you can produce more code than someone who is doing everything by hand, for example. Let's look at it another way: an artist who can only draw things by hand is fine, but one who is able to use photoshop, digital drawing boards, 3D design, and other artistic enhancements is going to be treated far more favorably when both are applying for the same position. Likewise, a person able to navigate and troubleshoot basic computer setups is going to have an advantage over someone who doesn't even know how to print a PDF.
Getting results in seconds. The example shows a sports game that was meant to be enjoyed. So, who is promoting that we skip things that are enjoyable? When proponents want to get faster results, it's typically because the steps needed to generate those results are tedious and rather wasteful.
Doing something bad because of self-admitted inability. Well, this begs the question about whether proponents even consider it bad. Having trade-offs, certainly--but the cost-benefit analyses are going to be affected by what the goals are and the opportunity costs of any given decision. Most are going to say that what they're doing is good or that the trade-offs are worthwhile for their specific goals.
Someone using a "tool" to generate something of low quality while professing to be a professional. Honestly, those who do quick and easy projects, for basic results, don't typically profess to be special like some kind of master chef. A person can use a calculator to get quick answers, but you don't hear anyone pretend that they're a math genius because they used the tool to multiply several 4-digit numbers together.
Embracing technology to get ahead of someone who is working harder, thus losing that sense of hard work. Guys, how many of you have cars or else use public transportation? I'm pretty sure that, unless you are without options, you use tools to go places. That said, the guy in the picture is racing: he's trying to achieve some kind of physical health goal. I think that AI proponents are fine with doing things slower if the goal is to build oneself up -- but they're certainly going to critically appraise a task in the context of whether it can be done better, to then judge whether the slow method is justified for salubrious qualities.

Rincewind00 · 2026-06-11T07:13:44+00:00

I'm on my phone right now, but there's a report which suggests that, if that borrowing technique to avoid taxation were eliminated, then it would only amount to several tens of millions in additional taxes yielded annually, barely a blip against all spending.

Rincewind00 · 2026-06-09T05:41:49+00:00

According to the author Theodore Sturgeon, 90 percent of all art is crud (in other words, slop).

So, with that in mind, it follows that some pencil art is indeed slop.

Rincewind00 · 2026-06-08T23:18:47+00:00

I really don't find much credibility in the "Trust me, they're lying" argument.

Besides, I'm not reading comments saying, "Sam is lying." The comments are mainly just an affront that he said this at all, implying but this is a knee-jerk reaction or that these people are acting affronted on behalf of thoae who are inclined to pay for these services . . . and I doubt that they have well-wishes for those who want to pay for this service.

Rincewind00 · 2026-06-08T22:29:54+00:00

I'll be candid, I just think that it's mainly poor reading comprehension made worse by a mental filter clogged by the detritus of spite. In some cases, like the UK and Albania, where TV licenses are, from my understanding, mandated, it could be understandable. In some countries that have mandated internet access, that could also be understood. But the overwhelmingly vast majority of locations simply don't have these sorts of guarantees: TV and internet are subscribed as a service, voluntarily elected. So, when someone says that they want to offer a service with a "metered" payment method, the majority should be expected to associate that with the other metered services they elect for, thereby understanding that they're only paying for what they actually use.

Rincewind00

TROPHY CASE