It's Time to Dunk on Our Friends
Specifically those people who paid money for the AI Art
Ok, if you’re not online in the neo-definition of online, you might not know about this. You might be suspended, like a pineapple chunk in a 70s jello salad dish, in bliss. I do not live like that, sadly. I live an online life, which I won’t defend here.
You may have seen, even if you aren’t online-online, people posting weird hot-adjacent badly rendered art of themselves. Of their own faces (and occasionally, almost redemptively— which is not a word—of their boobies or muscular thighs). There is a trend going around, which we must presume started on Tik Tok as all trends do these days, where you put a photo of yourself into an app and an AI generates art for you.
The problems with this are myriad. I assumed, stupidly, foolishly, that we had all learned from all the other trends like this that giving your likeness to an app without reading the fine print is A BAD IDEA. Famously, Facebook’s 10 year challenge meme from 2019 was criticized for being an easy way for them to get more facial recognition data. On top of the privacy concerns—which might be none because I guess who cares we already live in monetized, surveilled hell—there is also the fact that the whole thing is just…stealing art. They’re literally taking drawn art and chopping it up and repackaging it. And yeah, it’s not good now (lots of chopped up fingers and weird eyeballs) but it will and can be.
The whole thing was already a mess before it was made clear that people PAID FOR IT. They paid money to see themselves drawn as horny fairies and distorted superheroes. That should be embarrassing.
We should be dunking on all the people who did this. Because it’s hilarious to pay money for bad fan art of yourself. That is objectively something worst roasting. And yet so few people are actually making fun of it.
And I think it’s just because they don’t want to hurt their friends’ feelings— the feelings of the people who did this. They don’t want to point out how fucking stupid this whole thing is, so they’re saying things about the ethics of AI art or about the privacy concerns. Those things are real, but they are beside the point when it comes to roasting this. The point is that this shit is ugly art for the most part and that people paid for these bad paintings to be done of them the second it was offered up. I mean that’s funny. It has all the vibes of a poorly written influencer character in a Netflix Christmas movie.
And we should make fun of it because it’s harmless (outside of ethical concerns). Like the people who did this should get roasted, as we all should when we do something stupid and vainglorious. If I do something like this— and I’m sure I will! Just because this trend missed me doesn’t mean I won’t hop on the next one— I hope people make so much fun of me. It’s silly. It’s fine. It doesn’t mean that the people who paid for these renderings are evil bad people. It’s just funny.
Wanting attention, wanting to see yourself in a painting, wanting to be rendered into art isn’t bad or evil at all! Attention-seeking is normal and fine. Who cares if you’re vain or self-absorbed! Who else are you supposed to be absorbed with anyway?
But paying to make fan art of yourself is funny. And it’s fine to dunk on. You should get to dunk on your friends when they do shit like this.