Heard a guy at a coffee shop say AI art is just collage...

I was in Seattle last week grabbing a latte and this dude was explaining to his friend that Midjourney just steals bits from existing images... it got me thinking about how training data really works. Do you think the comparison holds up or is it way more complex than that?

2 comments

2 Comments

kais6714d ago

Rolled my eyes so hard I almost saw my own brain. People love acting like AI is just some fancy collage app when really it's more like a chef who's cooked a thousand meals and now knows how ingredients work together. Yeah, the training data came from existing images, but the model isn't literally storing and recombining them like a digital scrapbook. It picks up patterns, textures, lighting concepts, composition rules - same way a human painter learns from studying other artists. If a guy painting in the style of Van Gogh is "just collage" then I guess every artist ever is guilty too. Blows my mind how people can watch AI generate something completely new from scratch and still call it theft.

dakotacraig14d ago

Has @kais67 ever considered that the real problem isn't the AI itself but how we talk about creativity in general? Like, people freak out because a machine can learn patterns from thousands of images, but they never question why a human learning from the same amount of art is fine. It's basically the same process just way faster and without the need for sleep. The whole "theft" argument falls apart when you realize the model doesn't even store the originals - it learns rules about color and shape, same way a chef learns what tastes good together. The controversy should be about who benefits from the tech, not whether it's "real" art.