“This looks horrible.” – They’ll bleat this one out no matter how good it looks. I’ve proven this by posting classic paintings and prints from the great masters, with a little white lie that it was AI, and got this response back. They literally are not qualified to judge any art and are just on a witch hunt.
The argument that AI outputs are not “art” is a meaningless semantic game. Art is defined by human intent and curation. The AI output is merely a tool, a brush, a camera, a pencil, guided by prediction models to create assets used by a human director. The refusal to acknowledge this tool’s potential is a failure of creative imagination. I’ve laid out the evidence for this, again and again, in past articles.
The entire foundation of the “slop” defense is built on a misunderstanding of the creative process. They look at a raw, uncurated AI output and judge it as the final product. This critique is aimed at the raw clay, not the potential sculpture. The irony is that if they truly believed AI was a threat to art, they would simply go make art with traditional methods, as no one is forcing them to use AI, and no one is stopping them from working with their hands. Their true complaint is not about art being made differently; it is about the market shifting away from the places they got comfortable. When a person starts trying to pull the ladder up behind them to eliminate market competition, that is not about artistic integrity; that is about greed and professional entitlement. The very things they accuse everyone else around them of partaking in. We call that projection.
“Art is defined by human intent and curation.”
The legal and economic arguments against AI are rapidly collapsing under the weight of reality.
The false flag of Theft and Copyright has failed to gain traction in court. The legal reality is that AI models learn distributions and relationships; they do not store copies. The authors and artists attempting to tie AI up in litigation are demonstrating a profound level of professional selfishness. They are thinking only about their own past work, attempting to mandate high costs for a new creative pathway, thereby crippling everyone else’s ability to advance and innovate in the entertainment market. This move is less about defending copyright and more about securing their own personal market dominance at the expense of independent creators.
This protectionism is clearly demonstrated by those positioning themselves as unassailable moral authorities in Hollywood:
Guillermo del Toro’s declaration that he would “rather die” than use AI is a calculated act of aesthetic aristocracy. As a triple Oscar-winning filmmaker, he uses his established success in the high-budget system to dismiss efficient new tools, effectively guarding the high-cost barrier of entry that protects his own elite position. His rejection frames all AI adoption as an act of artistic compromise, a stance only affordable by the industry’s kings. Never mind that Del Toro has been called out numerous times for claiming that his movies are majority practical effects, while VFX teams work over time to touch up his shots, or that he continues to lean on the strip-mining of the public domain (Pinocchio, Lovecraft, Frankenstein) while copying the works of other directors, so he can continue to feed off of the Netflix cash-stream. (Notice, no studio wants to take a chance on him at the actual box office anymore?) Guillermo takes up all his press tour time bashing AI, when he could be talking about the merits of his own work, because he knows that his own work might not shine outside of today’s low standards within Hollywood. A breakout talent using AI will easily dethrone him.
