I tried to articulate this sentiment yesterday in a hastily fired off tag rant and ended up just deleting the reblog because... well, it's maybe a bit meaner than some of the prevailing sentiments floating around...?
But fuck it, it's AI. I'm allowed to be at least a little mean. So here's the honest truth for you, newcomer looking to make your mark on the community:
If you want to (or think you have to) use AI in order to make your work look as "good" as possible to maximize likes / reblogs / external validation, well, for starters, you're already doing it wrong โ but props for the honesty.
It may be possible for you to hack your way to hundreds of likes (hundreds!) by dissecting, data mining, and reverse engineering the perfect popular postโข to meet the millennial beige milquetoast standards of the #ts4 tag masses.
But no matter how many likes you rack up, alllllll those notifications dry up one day or another โ and in the end, what are you left with? A few stray follows from simblr sideblogs? A big sharp spike and a waning drop off on your activity chart? A gnawing awareness of the gaping maw of content consumption, ever ravenous to swipe, scroll, consume, and your feeble willingness to be chewed up, shat out, reconstituted into a copy of a copy of an original thought and consumed all over again?
What you probably won't have: thoughtful comments about the subject of your work, reblogs or follows from respected simblrs big and small, references to relevant other works you may or may not have previously explored, meaningful friendships or collaborations sparked up via DM or private server invites... The sort of external validation that sticks to your ribs and keeps you fed.
And therein lies a key difference between creatives and consumers. You may impress consumers with AI generated or optimized content. But creatives? You will never meet their standard or earn their respect with a shortcut copycat machine.
What you generate might pass muster to you, because you don't understand what you're looking at or even know what you're looking for, nor do other consumers. But creatives do. This is just as true of simblr as it is of any other creative profession or pursuit. The people you actually want to impress โ the ranks you want to call yourself a part of โ can tell, whether or not they bother to spend enough time to look for gen AI's fingerprints. Using AI at best, just makes your work boring and derivative. At worst, it makes you look sloppy and stupid to anyone who's opinion has ever actually mattered.
Creatives have already built their knowledge of, or eagerly dive into with each new passing project, the context of the broader themes of whatever body of work they pursue. There is an ethos, an elevator pitch, a vision โ not just of the work you want to make but the references it will pull from and the place in the world it will occupy. The cultural context and creative nuances are essential building blocks of considered creative work.
And if you're thinking, well, that's all a bit high brow, this is simblr we're talking about โ yes, for sure. The point I'm making is easier to explain on a grander scale but the principle absolutely applies. The parallels between "the arts" and personal artistic pursuit on any level have never been any closer because the shortcut copycat machine flattens it all into one amorphous puddle.
The shortcut copycat machine doesn't care about context. It delivers output based on a machine's literal understanding of its prompt and training data. It doesn't understand what's right or wrong for a specific composition or context. It doesn't even know how to stop itself from outright lying to you to meet your expectations.
You can use generative AI to fill the void with cheap thrills that leave you empty, disconnected, and craving more.
Or you can use your own creative ambition and the unprecedented-in-human-history, jaw droppingly astonishing wealth of resources and references all around you, largely for free, at the touch of a screen to learn and explore and build something new from.
And just maybe find your community โ and yourself โ in the process.
