Coca-Cola’s new holiday ad turned me off of AI-generated art completely

What makes so much A.I. art so bad, in my opinion, is that it’s so generic. These are generative systems. We keep calling them generative. But generative is so — when we use that term, it usually means it helped you get somewhere new. But these systems are mimics. They help you go somewhere old. They can help us write or draw or compose like anyone... See more

The incident once again highlights a common problem with all generative AI tools: whether it’s AI-generated images, music, or writing, these works are inherently derivative because anything they produce is made up of remixed pieces of work in the training data.

AI image generation is essentially a truncated exercise in taste; a product of knowing which inputs and keywords to feed the image-mashup machine, and the eye to identify which outputs contain any semblance of artistry. All that is to say: AI itself can’t generate good taste for you.