Had a chat with a digital artist at a comic con that still bugs me

I was at Fan Expo in Dallas last June and stopped at a booth selling prints. The artist saw my phone wallpaper which was an AI generated landscape I made for fun. He asked if I made it and when I said yeah with Midjourney he just said 'cool, so you typed some words and called it a day.' He walked off to help another customer and I stood there not knowing what to say. Has anyone else had an artist dismiss AI work like that without even asking about your process?

3 comments

3 Comments

allen.iris1mo ago

Oh man, 'so you typed some words and called it a day' is brutal. I'd probably have just stood there too with my mouth hanging open like a goldfish. I once brought a really detailed watercolor style piece to a local art show and the guy running it just said 'nice filter' without even looking at it for two seconds. It stings way more than it should, but you gotta laugh at how clueless some folks are about the actual time and tweaking that goes into getting a good AI result.

aaron_mitchell1mo ago

The 'nice filter' comment is exactly that same energy. People see the result and just assume it's a button press. They don't see the 50 failed generations or the manual fixing in Photoshop afterwards. That's where the real work is, the stuff nobody sees.

murray.cora1mo ago

The really sad part is they probably think that's how all art gets made.