AI Art Space Rant

Minor rant:

I reengaged on Twitter/X mainly to follow trends in AI/AI art.  I've seen a lot of people come and go in that space.  

The ones with the biggest followings ARE NOT necessarily the best.  They seem to be able to master the art of self promotion better than others.  

Most aren't bad, just not necessarily producing top tier stuff.  Yet they remain while others have faded. 

And I smile as I say creatively above, as it is prompt mastery, which is a real skill, but let's face it kids the AI models are the real creatives.  You just contract them with an outline of your creative vision but the AI does the work.  You are a prompter at some level of competence, and yes there is an art to that as well, but not even near on a scale of what the models do creatively for you.

And yes, there are some ai artist that are very creative and have big followings as they should.  But many...

1) Learned a few prompts, and use those over and over and over again just altering the scene slightly.  They aren't pushing out their knowledge of prompting and the particular quirks with different models as much as they could, instead just sticking to what has worked for them and reiterating.  That is a choice and it is fine, but I like to see creative explorations of a variety of topics/models/styles.  

2) Form little groups that self congratulate each other continually.

These first too just bum me out slightly, but this third group saddens me.

3) The "look what I can do" group, that actually does produce some amazing stuff (mainly video at this point).  But then you analyze what they did, and they might have burned through 100 bucks or more on credits to get there.  This is a divergence between those tools available to peeps that have big bucks and lesser tools available to those who don't.  It is a natural thing that happens in every human endeavor pretty much.  I don't know why it bums me out in the AI space more than other spaces...maybe jealousy?  

As someone who believes in meritocracy it is a little frustrating to peeps who do bad arse stuff fade or remain less seen. 

I'm not here to try to limit what people do.  I've pushed a lot of slop in my time, not trying to limit others from doing the same (even though our definitions of slop might vary).  I just worry more and more peeps with good stuff getting lost in the noise and those who have circled their wagons in little echo chambers blowing smoke of how good they are to each other.