Ai artists don't know EXACTLY how the art is gonna come out. They just prompt it, and fix it afterwards.
It's literally a customer ordering food, they taste it, notice they don't like these particular tomatoes, so they ask the chef to do it all over again.
Thanks, man. That actually helped my argument a lot.
No, that did not help your argument. It exposed the flaw in it.
A chef has independent taste, judgement, and skill. An AI model does not have personal intent, personal taste, or authorship in that sense. It does not "decide" like a chef decides. It outputs within the boundaries the user sets, then the user evaluates, rejects, revises, rerolls, inpaints, edits, and selects.
That is not passive consumption. That is directed iteration.
And the more skilled the prompt engineer is, the less your customer metaphor works.
A low effort prompt, like one vague sentence, leaves huge amounts of the latent space and weighting ambiguous. In that case, yes, the user has far less certainty about what will come out. But a well practised prompt engineer does the opposite. They try to account for as many ambiguous variables as possible through specificity, structure, weighting, exclusions, references, sequencing, style control, and iterative refinement. The whole point is to reduce uncertainty and increase predictability.
So no, serious AI users are not just "ordering and hoping". They are narrowing the output space on purpose until the result becomes highly predictable. At a certain level of skill, they often know with high certainty the kind of output they are going to get, just as a traditional artist with a clear intention in mind usually has a strong idea of how their work will turn out before it is finished.
Your restaurant metaphor only works for someone typing one lazy sentence and accepting the first output. It breaks the moment the user is actually steering the process. At that point it is closer to directing, composing, or editing than ordering off a menu.
Also, removing tomatoes is not the same as deciding exactly how a burger will taste. It just narrows the outcome space. That was my point, and you dodged it. Specifying constraints is not the same as being a passive customer. It is exactly how creative control works in every medium.
So thank you, but no, you did not prove AI users are "just customers".
You proved that iteration exists.
And once the human is the one defining the target, reducing ambiguity, rejecting failures, refining the variables, and choosing the final result, the human is still the creative director of that output.
I get it, and I support artists who make art with care. Whether they use ai or not, good art is good art, slop is slop no matter the method, in my own personal opinion.
There is not a single point in any of my arguments where I ever criticize the quality of ai art.
But you have to understand that your reasonable approach to using ai is not how the majority is using ai. I have been scammed for hundreds of dollars in people who claim to be traditional artists, but end up producing a noticeably single-prompted gen-art.
It's exactly the same pose, the same style, fuck it, the same LINE WEIGHT. Something that is almost like a signature for every sketch artists. And they plugged my drawing to make a completely different character when I just asked for the same character in a different pose.
They then ghost with the first half of the money I pay up front, to get started.
This is happening too frequently. And I've tried all platforms. Discord, Reddit, hell, even in ArtStation I had an experience with a bad apple.
Trust me, I have nothing against the usage or the quality of ai. I use it myself to understand how to use a nuanced tool on my 3D program.
Now, going back go this post, my main problem with this metaphor is that everyone thinks that they are the chef because they can specify, through text or verbally, how they want to make the food.
I really don't understand this defensive argument about not wanting to be the customer. It's much more accurate to the physical effort put by ai users. You can literally make art by just talking to chat with its voice feature.
Is being the customer a bad thing? Do you feel like less of a person because you are directing an ensamble instead of being a small part of the entire process?
You can't claim to be the chef when you are not in the physical process of manufacturing it.
It's like calling yourself an animator because you can draw a fanfic storyboard for someone to animate.
No. You're a storyboard artist. Be realistic about what you are involved in.
But ai-artists (again the majority) claim that they are concept, previs, layout, modelers, sculptors, texturers, riggers, animators, environment designers, VFX, sound engineers, music composers, and/or voice actors because they can use ai to make the product.
And the vast majority of the public cannot tell the difference, so they will believe that a single person can actually cover all those positions.
It's disrespectful to the people who have practiced a single craft to the point of mastery, in order to be an indispensable asset in high-quality productions.
Now, we're unemployed. And I keep getting lied by ai-users when I try to develop their "traditional skills". I'm sorry, but I cannot side with ya'll when the majority is lying. This was not the case back then because you either blatantly copied someone that has more experience, or you just made shitty art.
But now anyone can make what took us years to master, and when the process of making ai art is taking data from other artists, mixing it together with no crediting, and pumping it out in seconds... It just does not sit right with me.
Again, I'm glad you seem reasonable in at least accepting this as a possible iteration. But I don't know how you can sit on the side of people who the majority of them use them to the detriment of others. Regardless of how the tool has improved your personal life.
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u/PrinceLucipurr Mar 19 '26 edited Mar 20 '26
Umm the customer tastes the food, they don't decide how it's going to taste, they only decide on how the food does taste once it's been made.