Man, I suuuuck at drawing and painting. But (up until the last couple weeks I guess) I've been making and posting my shitty ass, MS Paintesque paintings and collages. Why?

Because you and I are humans and creative expression is our fucking right.

Because you don't get better at anything unless you keep doing it.

Because people, at least here, prefer a technically shitty artistic effort to a better looking image made by a insanely thirsty software architecture owned by greedy technocrats.

Because fuck it, we can.

Post those drawings homie.

Thanks, you are being really helpful...
I at least tried to understand the problem and explain my reasoning. And yes, I do not know much about the topic, but everyone here is complaining how I am wrong without saying why so.

So, to have an idea, let's do the calculation.
Generating 1000 images takes on average 2.907kWh (Power Hungry Processing: Watts Driving the Cost of AI Deployment?, A. S. LUCCIONI et. al., 2024), though with very large varience (standard deviation of 3.31). So generating a single image consumes on average 2.91Wh.
I have to make a few assumptions about the artist. First of all, I will ignore the energy their body would consume, since it is pretty safe to assume, they would need the energy anyway.
Let's assume it would take the artist one hour to produce the same image (based on nothing, just the ease of calculation; feel free to correct me).
If the artist was drawing using a PC monitor, they would consume tens of watt-hours based on the monitor (Internet article: What is PC Monitor Power Consumption? A Complete Guide, Akash, 2026). Computer with all peripherals would consume even more.
If the artist would choose iPad, using official parameters (Apple Inc.), the iPad should last up to 10 hours with its 28.93Wh battery, so the drawing would consume at least 2.893Wh. This is slightly less then AI, but charging the iPad isn't 100% efficient. Also they would probably use a stylus for drawing, which also uses some electricity, so I would say the total power needed would be comparable (please don't force me to calculate these efficiencies).
If the artist would draw on a paper, it would get so much complicated and probably lost in all of the assumptions about materials used, their production complexities, etc. But just for a comparison, a efficient LED light consumes from 4W (Internet article, How Much Electricity Does a LED Light Bulb Use?, 2025), so using a bulb for 44 minutes consumes more energy than generating an image.

So overall under my assumptions, generating a image using AI is at least comparable, probably more efficient then hiring an artist to do the same.

I ignored training the AI, because the more it is used, the less effect it has on the generation, and goes to 0 over time. In the same way I ignored the monitor / iPad / light bulb energy footprint during its production and transfer to the artist, since with more paintings this effect goes to 0 too.

Please do not force me to do any more calculation. I think, this was enough.

Great policy.

I only hope mods can keep up as the deluge washes in. Tons of brand new accounts seem to love spamming channels with slop, then go dead once they've been banned across enough instances

You know why I hate it even more now?

Because unaware people have started using it to generate images of our loved ones, houses, etc.

I CAN'T EVEN FUCKING TRUST A PHOTO OF MY NEPHEWS ANYMORE.

I HATE that. If my friends, family and home aren't refuges against that AI shit, then what the fuck is?!

I’d rather see absolutely nothing instead of AI

That’s a lot of fucking words that all just boil down to “I have no artistic or moral integrity and no respect or regard for the value of art or the human endeavor.”

Go fuck a robot.

I've got people praising my poorly drawn graphs, of all things. 5min stuff like this:

So yes, odds are they'll like your drawings better over mass produced AI slop.

In the beginning, people used simple programs like ms paint with a mouse to draw. I use my phone's editor to draw stuff. Have a cat

After the first 100 or so AI images I saw, the novelty of "wow this is technically possible" wore off and now I kind of hate anything generated by ai even if it looks good (which it usually doesn't).

We're going to need a Butlerian jihad at the rate this is going.

Same here. AI slop has turned me (and my brother) off of YouTube shorts. Like 80-90% of the content is AI, and you have to play detective for most of them (to find out it's AI generated)

Without the ears and with broad paws, it nicely doubles as a sea lion.

I wouldn't call anything I've ever seen on lemmy art. Maybe like2 the photos of actual art.

I consider myself to be alright by hobbyist standards, at least, but here's a watercolor and watercolor crayon painting of a pair of bunnies skating on a frozen pond at night.

And yeah, I kinda love watercolor crayons as a medium, at least in combination with watercolors, and I'm a newbie to watercolor crayons.

Plus, here's an acrylic painting of a mouse building a snowman at night for a bonus pic, and yeah, I know the snow and mouse are supposed to be white, but I gave that whole scene a pink/purple tint for the sake of cuteness.

Also, I very, very much have a preference for traditional media over digital tools mainly because traditional media have always been fun for me to play with, painting in particular I tend to get lost in for hours at a time.

Finally, I'm adding a wax crayon drawing to this post because why not, but here's a wax crayon drawing of Pichu and Dedenne building a snowman, and I'll stop here before this post gets too spammy. And just like with the mouse painting above, I gave this scene a pink/purple tint because that's cute, also, wax crayons are one of my fave drawing media currently alongside oil pastels and chalk in any order.

These are cute as fuck and I love them! Definitely understand the appeal of traditional media over digital (my stuff's digital mostly because of accessibility).

I wouldn't call anything I've ever seen on lemmy art. Maybe like2 the photos of actual art.

Same here. AI slop has turned me (and my brother) off of YouTube shorts. Like 80-90% of the content is AI, and you have to play detective for most of them (to find out it's AI generated)