Art & Inspiration Preserving History in the AI Age

Bal Ras, the car for backseat drivers…

 

Interestingly on was on a page on a social feedia platform the other day & it made it clear that AI images would be deleted when found & the used blocked if they kept doing it. Viva la resistance

 

That’s enough to make me vomit!

 

AIAF (AI as ****). That's my call sign when the **** hits the stuff we know. "Just Google it" used to be more viable than it is now also. I could search "41 Cadillac taillight lense" and get a pant load of 41 Cadillac stuff. Now I get taillights for CTS, Escalade, floor mats, maybe 3 or 4 41 Cadillac anything.

Part numbers are just a sip of coffee away from worthless trying to search anywhere. And the AIAF input might give you the history or some other useless drivel, certainly not what you're looking for. I have 55-65, 65-75, and 75-85 Hollander interchange manuals. So I could be the **** I usually am and just say **** AI. But I think the real/real is the input. Somebody who only knows urban legend wives tales thinks he can input data in AI. The programmers don't have all the data. They're also mostly subjects of helicopter parents and the en***lement generation. No detail, follow up, or qualified knowledge. The slap-*** result is what we see now. Do we think somebody just might connect to actual info? I'll take my parts books any day, especially the Hollanders. So far they haven't lied to me.

 

Yeah, thats real Fake alright , there's not a can of Meister Bräu in his hand

 

**** AI!!! That's generally how I feel about it. As some others have said, I refuse to go to a show that has an AI generated flyer. It's just plain cheap and lazy, especially when there are so many great local artists in every corner of our country.

I do, however, understand that AI is way to broad of a term, and we should really specify that what we all hate is, I guess, called "generative AI" or similar. I think that there are probably a lot of AI powered tools that are used in non-offensive ways. To use your colorized photos as an example, IMO it would be wrong to just plug the photo into a generative AI program and say "color, please!" and the post the results as legit. But, on the other hand, if an artist used some AI powered tools in his photo editing software that help expedite and streamline his work, there isn't anything wrong with that. There's a big difference between AI creating an image, and an artists using an AI tool to more quickly and accurately trace out a section of a photo that they are altering, or maybe using an AI program to help determine what color a part of the image may have been based on values of known colors, or whatever other technical things to help them create a better piece. In those types of scenarios, it is still 100% the artist that created the art. No different, in my mind, that an artist that decided to switch from pen and paper to a digital sketch pad. They are still using their hands and their brains to create art. No brains at all are required to punch a "car show flyer 50s diner hot rod guitar man route66 Sunday 11am and make sure you leave out the address" prompt into AI, and therefore that is not good, and it is certainly not art.

I will end by saying, there is one really, really great thing that generative AI has done for society. It has provided us all with a way of determining who around us cares at all about truthfulness, who cares about real art and supporting artists, and who just wants to make a quick buck with as little effort as possible. So, there's that.

Really, like most new tech, I thing 100% of the problems with AI can be attributed to people and corporations overestimating and overvaluing it's usefulness.