https://blog.johanneslink.net/2025/11/04/to-gen-or-not-to...

I'm sort of amused by "Real art is not about the product but about the process, which requires real humans". We've been here since the Jacquard loom; if you have to start talking about the process, you've lost. I have one item of clothing that was hand tailored, and that was tailored for my father. Craftmanship didn't keep most of us using mechanical watches, or hand tailored clothing.

I recall a case a couple decades back where an RPG book was published and the author was on forums complaining about the cover, but the publisher needed an illustration, bought a piece of Rowena's that was vaguely appropriate, and printed. Book illustration then and now often wasn't and isn't about Real Art; it's about slapping something on a cover or an interior page.

90% of translation work was never about real art. It was about translating bureaucracy, official documents from one language to another. There's a certain level of translation work that definitely needs a human touch, but at the same time, I can't afford to hire a translator for Ringelnatz's "Die Walfische und die Fremde", but that didn't stop me from enjoying it with the help of ChatGPT. Translation is about making things accessible, and computer translation has long been a cheap way to access another language. It's certainly an argument for an "actual use case".

"Everybody can do it; but not everybody wants to do put in the effort, the practicing time and the soul." smells like elitism, and could be swung against virtually all programmers, who don't want to put in the effort to work in machine language (Mel the Real Programmer reminds us that in assembly, you have to use separate constants), or don't want to put in the work to get pure proven code in Idris or Agda, or at a lower level, can't hack manual memory handling or don't want to put in the effort to understand a Turing-complete type system.

I'm not terribly comfortable yet with commercial projects using AI art. But while I could spend 10,000 hours learning to draw my character for my D&D game, I could also use 1 hour grabbing some picture online or prompting AI, and one of those is more ... sane. Acting outraged I don't spend hours learning to draw doesn't convince me of anything.