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Comment by purpleflashing

Interesting. I am one of the people who adores visuals. Instagram and Tumblr used to be my favorite places, I had my own pretty pictures curation blogs, my way of relaxing was creating Pinterest boards. Now, I also like "serious" art but I wouldn't scroll museum galleries when I just needed to feel a little whimsy, I went to Pinterest and often didn't care about the author behind them in many cases because the pictures were derivative enough to not feel "special" (but sometimes I would and then I would discover new artists).

I don't engage with this hobby anymore since the platforms got flooded with AI-generated content. Now, I do like some early and cheeky AI-generated images (mostly pre-ChatGPT), but not after -- and not because of corporate and social politics -- I'm honestly largely out of the news cycle and don't know what terrible or amazing thing some AI company did this week. And yet my hobby completely died and it was strangely disorienting because I struggled to find something else that could replace it, I don't have social media and didn't have feeds except for on those three platforms (I deleted them all now).

I am an outlier from the general population in how I engage with visuals, and I do think that it's likely that all of the commercial visuals in the future will be AI generated, now, I don't think they will be pretty, though. I think they will be largely ugly. I think the majority of people don't actually care about "pretty pictures" at all and are content with very ugly things surrounding them all the time. And the rest can't help it.

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