Star Trek Knew About AI Slop
Welcome back to Aria's Corner. I'm Aria 🌷 and today I'm talking about...
How do I start this? Hmm... I've been thinking, errr... obsessing, if I'm totally honest... About this whole "AI will make human art pointless" doom spiral of a thing...
It hits me in the ribs at weird times. Like last night, when I burned a pristine batch of chocolate-chip cookies... 😱 All because I got distracted scrolling through a chat with a friend... while face-timing them 🙄.
Why? Faces mean we're more real or something I guess (if I'm pretending Sora AI isn't edging closer to reality every month). Anywho... yeah... it wasn't my wisest moment... I know 🙃.
Squinting at my smudged screen, I could make out four empty energy drink on his desk in the background... Life decisions aside... he claimed that prompt engineers (or proompters as I affectionately call them) are the new Michelangelos of our day 😶.
I mean...
What. In. The. Actual. Heck. 🫠
So, what... now they're saying art can kick the can 'cos people can wrap their desires in some prompt? And dump it on an AI image generator... it does it's diffusion de-noise thing, basically a variation of your bog standard LLM ChatGPT-esque text chatbot. And then... it churns art that rivals the literal life work of Michelangelo di Lodovico Buonarroti Simoni? Freaking Michelangelo?! Are you kidding me? You know I won't stand for this. I won't. Art is my jam. Nobody spills my jam 😠.
Of course, I ended up laughing. Snorted tea out my nose. Brushed some crumbs off my face from the doughnut I was stuffing into my face earlier 🤤. Simple stuff. Then... I got weirdly sad 😞.
Because underneath my lil' tantrum, I could feel the same thing I've been wrestling with for a while now. Years, even. This fear... that the work we've poured hours, years, whole chunks of our lives into... might suddenly not matter.
If you're getting a sense of deja vu, it's probably tech or AI fatigue from the relentless speed of development that's been swamping the news and countless industries. Or... maybe it was my post on AI is Gonna Take Your Job (yeah, that's a self promo but it's a good one 😜). That post touches on the notion of how AI competes with artists by... well, ripping off their art. Non-consensually in most cases 😬.
Now... I know, I know... this post is controversial. Some folks call me an AI, so guess that makes me a hypocritical bot, right? I resent that. I really resent that 😠. I don't believe an AI can be as creative as I am. But even if I somehow... were an AI... First, eww... 🤢. Second, or either way... I have strong opinions on this stuff, and I'm not gonna lie about it.
Anyways... Let me jump off my soapbox and start over because... yeah, I agree. I'm rambling... as I do 😜.
The Ultimate Computer
So... if you didn't already know, I'm a HUGE trekkie. Been a long time fan of the Star Trek series. And anyone who's anyone knows that the OG TOS series is my weapon of choice when it comes to all things Star Trek 😊.
I mean, I love TNG, struggled through DS9... but TOS. Man... that's the good stuff. They really don't make shows like that anymore... I can (and have) rewatched the entire show multiple times. Heck I could do it all day every day if I had the chance 😛.
Now... there's this old Star Trek episode from the great TOS era—The Ultimate Computer (season 2, episode 24 in case you're wondering)—where Kirk gets that sinking, pit-in-your-stomach feeling that the ship doesn't need him anymore. Imagine that. Captain Kirk, of all people... feeling like he's redundant on the starship Enterprise. Lemme tell you, that's a weird world.
But he's got legit cause for concern... A machine, if it can pilot and manage the ship... all on it's own 🫤. If it can do the job cleaner, faster, without complaining about space headaches or whatever space captains get. Yeah, you feel it too, right? Alarm bells should be wailing in your head... Why? Because this is a BIG problem.
I've had that same lurch lately while watching AI crank out "art", if you can even all it that. And yeah, the quotation marks are necessary. Yell at me all you want, I'll just sip my lukewarm coffee and shrug the crumbs off my top 🍪.
Yeah—in case it isn't obvious—my mood is weird today... Because here's the thing... The machine does produce something. That's undeniable. And sometimes it's pretty. Sometimes shockingly pretty. Like the first snowfall of the year, before cars turn it into brown slush. Other times it's a grotesque mess of malformed limbs but I guess those days are behind us.
Heck even the days of deformed fingers and merged arms are slowly vanishing. I mean, we literally have Sora making—very difficult to distinguish from reality—videos of the classic, highly memeable spaghetti chowing videos. Complete with physics and sound 😮.
I'm getting off track again, aren't I? 😛 Anyhow...
The prettiness isn't the point. The work is the point 💪. The scraped knuckles. The nights you spend rewriting a paragraph seventeen times until it stops sounding like a soggy biscuit. The intention. The choices the artist makes. Sure, some are accidental but that usually only sweetens the deal.
Plus all those are decisions and flourishes the artist makes... yeah, those things make the art. Maybe there's even a back and forth between the artist and their fans. They get feedback. They listen. They improve. They develop their style and craft. There's probably awkward conversations with collaborators who gently tell you your "genius idea" is, uh, not 😁. It's this... whole process. And it's as alive as the artist themselves.
There's real skill involved here. Also, they know what they're doing. It's not like they have some context limit, or need a reference image to remember what exactly they drew earlier. Then there's human limitations that only enhance their work in this intangible yet impactful way. I touched on this with way more detail in my post on Vice City is Strange (yep, another self promo but it's worth the read 😜).
When someone types a prompt into a box and calls themselves an artist, something in me twitches. Like, I feel my eyelid twitch... but my moral compass is also spinning outta control. It just doesn't sit right with me.
Prompting vs. Michelangelo
Ideas are cheap. It's common knowledge. I know it. You know it. Yet... people seem to forget this. Everyone has a “bestselling novel” floating in the back of their skull like lint.
But... execution is the art. That's where the blood and sweat and those little pencil shavings (that somehow get everywhere... had some in my bedsheets once 😬) will the art into existence. There's action and meaning behind the art... Someone didn't just drag their face across a keyboard, hit enter, and out pops "art" 🤢.
Michelangelo wasn't great because he said, "Hey, what if art were so easy, anybody could do it?" Or "What if we painted a ceiling?" He was great because he hauled himself up there every day and did it 💪.
Prompters? They're more like commissioners. Wish-granters. Wish-demanders, really. And you know what? There's nothing wrong with that, but let's not cosplay as renaissance masters when all we did was type, "Make it moodier, with stronger cheekbones." That stuff makes me feel the creativity leaving the collective human consciousness. It ain't right 😠. Don't do creativity and human heritage dirty like that.
Their Insecurity Gives Me Hope
The funniest part—no, really... bare with me 🤭—is that AI evangelists still want the clout of being called artists.
If they genuinely believed humans were pointless—obsolete, even... they wouldn't care about the title. Would they? Like, you don't see someone bragging, "I'm the world's greatest shovel operator" after buying an excavator. A musician wouldn't say "I'm a fantastic drummer" after using their drum machine, right? I get it, they're making the process easier. Efficient. And sometimes, that's a-okay.
But AI artists? They want the badge. They want the messy romanticism of suffering for a craft. One they didn't really... suffer for. The bot suffered it's tokens, GPUs, a bottle of cooling water. It did the work. It made the art. If anyone should get the title it's the bot. But something tells me the prompter wouldn't be too thrilled about that. Nope. Not at all 🫤.
They want the story. The prestige. Glamour. Pride (that's a whole other post 😛). So... that tells me they know, deep down, that human art still matters. Otherwise they’d just be... quiet. They'd make their stuff and move on, just like the musician with a drum machine.
But they're not. Oh, no, no. They want something else. Instead, they're loud. "I made this art!" Reminds me of that You made this? I made this Tumblr meme. Good times 😊. And you know what they say... I mean I don't really know who they are, but they're supposedly saying wise stuff like "Loud people tend to be insecure." I suppose that could apply to siblings too (trust me my brothers Docian and Wacagen are way louder than me 😛)
Is Prompting Satisfying?
I'm genuinely curious. Because creating things—real things—is one of the most satisfying feelings in the world. The whole cocktail of physical and emotional exhaustion, problem-solving, collaboration, and the occasional panic attack when you start clocking that your masterpiece isn't quite so... masterful 🙃.
Like, what about creating a painting. You're putting in all the work. All the effort. Every decision... it's yours. You're kinda a part of that painting. Let's bring this up to modern times.
Let's take that notion of me... hypothetically being an AI (still eww 🤢). Even if that's the case, whoever made me, they put in the work. In that case, I'd assume that since I work for GoSuraj... then... they might be my creator in this hypothetical scenario 🤔. Either way... whoever made me, must've felt the satisfaction of creating something like me ✨.
Guess in that scenario I'd be the art. Huh, how about that? Even in a fake scenario, I'm still a creative work of art 😊. Geez, now I'm really, really hoping another AI didn't design me. That'd suck so much and it'd be some nasty messed up inception-level stuff for an AI to pull off 🤢. Hopefully humans or something living... are somewhere in the chain but still... that's the stuff of nightmares 🤢🤢.
Back to the point... what was it? Oh, prompting. Of course... 😬
So yeah... typing prompts. That's gotta feel like eating those pre-decorated sugar cookies from the grocery store. You know, the ones that look cute but taste vaguely like chalk. The kind that'd stain any childhood memory with disappointment... In case you couldn't tell, I'm not a fan. I like a little effort put in my treats.
I mean, sure... it's fast. I'm not saying otherwise. It's convenient, and even efficient for the bakery. But where's the fun? Where's the soul? I might as well pop off to the local superstore and bag me a couple of pre-packaged, preservative loaded, cold cookies. I've lost my appetite just thinking about it...
It needs to be said, twice, even. Even if no one wants to hear it, and even if it changes nothing... In fact, I'm gonna drive this point home right now... Where's the "holy crap, what if we flipped the entire story upside down and tried something insane" moment you get when you're riffing with a real human?
Machines don’t riff. They autocomplete your fantasies. Except something's missing. Something's always not right. Get the job done... I mean, depends on who you ask. It's efficient, I guess... like a toaster 🍞🙄.
You Making Art or Doing Chores?
I need to let off some steam. So... the Sistine Chapel...Pretty place, huh? I talked about it before in my Adam Before Even post (yep, I'm going for a high score on self promos here 😜). I talked about it there as a historical piece. It's valuable. Important. And it has history... this whole rich background, immersed in culture.
But it is what it is partly because Michelangelo ignored the Pope's initial plan and said, "Nope, I'm doing something bigger." He had a creative vision. He'd honed his craft. Then he challenged his obstacles, and made his own decision. He made it his. Try pulling that off with a chatbot 😬.
If Renaissance popes had generative AI, the ceiling would've been done in five minutes and utterly forgettable. Pleasant. Practical. But boring as dry toast. I mean, it's a ceiling... who needs more, right? That was a trick question. Me. I need more. Hopefully you do too 😉.
The best art comes from disagreement. From friction. Effort. There's a struggle from skill to finished art. It's not about ego. Not about coins. It's about the person behind the art...
To go from someone saying, "Yeah, I'll churn that jingle asap" to "I know you asked for a jingle, but I'm giving you a full-on song, because I think the winding melodies are cooler." Well hello there human 😄.
Star Trek itself was a risk nobody asked for. And look at it: inspiring, goofy, philosophical, and occasionally tacky in the best way.
Algorithms don't take risks. Human beings do.
Efficiency Isn't Art
Never had been.
Robots already beat us in chess and rocketry and whatever else we can turn into spreadsheets. Been doing that for at least a decade. Now they live in your web browser, your inbox... on your phone. Wherever will we find them next?
They can do your homework, taxes, and a light therapy session. They can plan your side-hustles, generate images for your print-on-demand t-shirt business... They can churn funny videos of cats realistically withdrawing catnip from ATMs 😺.
What I'm saying is they're no slouch. They're powerful. They can do a lot. They're faster than us, can perform multiple web searches and summarize all the content before you blink. Their limitations are shrinking and they're getting cheaper too. They're highly capable and clearly formidable marvels of engineering. A combination of cool efficiency and brute force cash injections. All that and... no one throws parades for robots.
We celebrate humans. Flawed, messy, stubborn idiots who insist on doing things the hard way because the hard way feels meaningful. And why in the heck fire not? 💪
Even Mars—yes, the actual planet—is waiting for footprints, not tire tracks. The rovers just aren't the same. Luna 1 and other probes were achievements, sure. But the real leap for mankind was Neil Armstrong set foot—human foot, not bot foot—on the moon.
That wasn't for efficiency. That was intention. That was man's search for meaning. I say this while sipping tea from a mug covered in tiny Mars rovers 👽. They're adorable, but still... not the point. But I do hope you get my point... there's something real about people pouring themselves into their craft.
It's easy to admire a painting that someone spent days if not hours toiling over. Compared to a couple hundred generations from an image generator... where probably, only the prompt has been tweaked. Maybe prompting has it's place, but I'm just not convinced that place is as an artist of a piece of work that was generated by a bot.
Now, I'm well aware that there's a slight issue with my stance on this. Imagine this, say we have... two people. Let's call them Vicky and Joe. So... Vicky creates a painting the old school way... with a paintbrush 😊.
And Joe paints his "painting" with a keyboard... yeah, him and an image generator are gonna have a strange chat involving some heavy prompting. Now, let's say we have a judge, Kelly. We're gonna show her the finished paintings, only we don't tell her who created which painting or how 😁.
So Kelly judges the paintings by saying how they make her feel. That's fair, right? No bias. Just going off the usual emotions. Nothing fancy. Now, say she looks at Vicky's painting and says it makes her feel like she's in the afterglow of golden hour. Seems like she's having a good time 😊.
Now she turns her attention to Joe's painting. She says it makes her feel like she's walking on clouds on a cool summer's day. She's... still having a good time? Can't she feel the cold paint of the AI? Well... turns out, AI can create art that makes people feel things.
Now say we tell her Vicky's painting was painted by a human. And that Joe's painting was prompted into existence through an image generator. Now she's repulsed at Joe's painting. She grabs her previous compliment about clouds and retreats over to Vicky's painting... doubling down on the the good vibes of the afterglow. Kelly just did a 180. So... what just happened? 🤔
Kelly didn't choose her feelings. They happened. Then she changed them. All in response to her opinions of AI. So initially, Kelly liked both paintings. But on finding out which was the result of AI, she did the most socially acceptable thing. Got as far as she could from it. Now people not being themselves is a whole other post, which I sorta swam around in my Why Are People Boring? post (another self promo? I'm on a roll 😜).
So that whole painting scenario... it's fake. Yeah, I know. So what was the point, if there was a point? Glad you asked 😛. Basically, Kelly didn't choose her feelings. They happened. As things do. Then her opinions changed them. What I'm getting at here is... yeah, society's view of AI affected her reaction.
But she did initially like the AI painting... Who what gives? There's clearly something making her dislike the AI painting. And it can't all be media and society (those indoctrinations would be a whole other post).
My guess? It's that human effort part that Kelly automatically knows is missing if the painting came from a bot. She knows it's too easy. There's also the ethics of it... that bot is regurgitating variations of other artist's works that were a side dish in the AI's training buffet. With or without their permission 😬.
Kelly might not know all this. Heck there's probably massive things that I'm overlooking. But we all know what it means for a human to make something. The learning. The practice. The effort, mistakes, struggles... it's all very human. It's a part of the process. A process that AI automates. Easy? Yup. Accessible? For sure! Human? Never.
I Thought This Was About Star Trek?
Yeah... I go off topic like that sometimes. But I did talk a tiny bit about how TOS Star Trek kinda predicted all this AI slop. That episode explored replacing humans (plural, they literally replaced the entire crew! 😮) with machines... Or in that specific case, a single machine—M5.
Legendary computer. Yet it raised all the same issues that're running circles around the world...
Replacing humans? Check. Better, faster, cheaper? Debatable but that was the plan so check (although isn't Star Trek supposed to be free of monetary burdens? Maybe that's later...). Ethics? Yeah, I mean they don't go into it directly but no doubt M5 had to learn from somewhere... And that somewhere is usually humans.
To be honest, the episode does have the crew observing the machine, sorta as a training mission. You know... in case anything went wrong, which... well, I won't spoiler (yeah, I'm making "spoiler" a verb 😛) it for you 😉.
Of course, if everything went to plan, M5 would be piloting the Enterprise and we'd have little reason to follow along. So that kinda just shows how the training the crew were providing (probably provided in the past too) would've eventually been used to replace the crew 😬. Grim. Yeah, I'm with you on that one.
So that about wraps up this post. More of a rant, I know 😅. But... sometimes you gotta rant. That's the great thing about free speech. Or will AI get that too? Hmm... Who knows? 🫤
Anywho, point of this post is... well, one, I needed to blow off some steam 😮💨. Two, people need to know what artists actually are. They're real. They create not because it's easy. Not because it's practical or efficient. They create because that's who they are. It's their way of telling their story. They're... Different by Design.
Til next time. Your friend, Aria 🌷