In Defense of "Bad Art"
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Sometime at the end of 2025, one simple morning with my iced chocolate (don't ask), my twitter feed (yeah, I will never call it X), yet again, got flooded with an art discourse. Users crowding around an, 'artist's' post showcasing their artwork that they had registered into a well-known local coffee brand contest. The art looked nice, warm colors and pretty anime characters, but off. Off enough that if you had seen the likes of those pictures you'd know: the "artwork" was AI-generated.
Sadly, this was not my first time, as I'm sure it's nobody's first time either, including those users in the replies. Picture this: the audacity of someone—who drew "bad art" just weeks before that "pretty art", the same "bad art" anyone could find if they'd just browse down the person's media tab—joining a contest using a generative-AI, which the public was aware of had been stealing hundreds of thousands of artists' works online as their data training for years, including Studio Ghibli's director Hayao Miyazaki's artworks. Then, as the masses dug deeper into this artist's account, it turned out that this "artist" was just a high school student.
Was it such a big surprise? Not to me, at least.
This morning I found this post written by phoebesflow on Threads that got me thinking:
Something about AI that really breaks my heart is the probable death of bad art. We NEED bad art. Like someone’s untrained teenage niece drawing their small biz logo. College students crowd funding a charming short film that’s 90% terrible. Amateur musicians making miraculously catchy garbage. Bad art is the zest of life and the bud from which creative genius blossoms. But slop flattens everything.
I think it is an interesting take with nostalgia and grief as its core. That's valid. I'm feeling it too—more and more often as of late actually, especially as someone in my early 30s now. Mostly, my own grief revolves around art community. I still remember deviantArt. I still remember small forums and blogs. I even remember small art websites communities from which I still maintain online friendships with for more than fifteen years, but that's a different essay.
As much as I dislike generative-AI, I don't completely agree with phoebesflow's statement. Not because it's wrong, but because it's incomplete. To me, the existence of "bad art" has been rapidly diminishing not since generative-AI came out, but ever since the space for teenagers, young adults, and amateurs started to completely disappear. Which is to say: since the rising popularity of social medias in 2011.
Naturally, these social medias have more adults in them. Because adults are the marketing target. Social media platforms mostly gain their revenues through advertisements and successful advertisements are ones that result in revenues for the businesses or, at least, brand awareness. It's safe to say that social medias were made with adults in mind, whether we like that or not.
Despite most adults not wanting to interact with underage people or teens online, teens would still be able to see the posts made by professionals (who are adults, by the way) because of the social media's algorithm. Just from this fact alone we can see that the space for teens or amateurs to share their "bad art" is already mixed up with "public" internet spaces. Anonymity makes social media a lawless country. We already know how mean people on the internet could be to what they consider "bad art".
This consumption of "good art" in social medias, I think, has influenced many people not to see art as a progress to improvement, but as consistent final products. Not to mention that every artist on social medias now seem to be forced into making a brand out of their art and their videos (again, because of the algorithm). So, these teens, young adults, or amateurs being exposed to art as a "brand" instead of art as a dynamic improving progress would feel that there's no space for them to even make (or post) "bad art" anymore. They feel the need to be "good enough" for an invisible audience. They feel the need to be perfect as a preemptive countermeasure to being criticized by a future consumer. Why do you think a lot of artists online take "shortcuts" nowadays?
This is not a criticism to the people's actions online (if some artists trace someone else's works or choose to steal someone else's artstyle, that's on them and I think it's a shitty behavior regardless the rationalized reasoning). This is, however, a criticism of systemic failure starting from the rising of social media. To me, the generative-AI era right now is just another shit piling on top of an already tall pile of shit. And if that's not making you nostalgic for the old-time internet, I'm not sure what would.
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