this post was submitted on 08 Oct 2026
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Showerthoughts
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A "Showerthought" is a simple term used to describe the thoughts that pop into your head while you're doing everyday things like taking a shower, driving, or just daydreaming. The most popular seem to be lighthearted clever little truths, hidden in daily life.
Here are some examples to inspire your own showerthoughts:
- Both “200” and “160” are 2 minutes in microwave math
- When you’re a kid, you don’t realize you’re also watching your mom and dad grow up.
- More dreams have been destroyed by alarm clocks than anything else
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- The entire showerthought must be in the title
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- If your topic is in a grey area, please phrase it to emphasize the fascinating aspects, not the dramatic aspects. You can do this by avoiding overly politicized terms such as "capitalism" and "communism". If you must make comparisons, you can say something is different without saying something is better/worse.
- A good place for politics is c/politicaldiscussion
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If you made it this far, showerthoughts is accepting new mods. This community is generally tame so its not a lot of work, but having a few more mods would help reports get addressed a little sooner.
Whats it like to be a mod? Reports just show up as messages in your Lemmy inbox, and if a different mod has already addressed the report, the message goes away and you never worry about it.
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The question has never been whether people want it. I think it's pretty clear they do. The problem is whether people want to spend the time in money, or skill, to get it.
I would love to be able to paint sci-fi pinups. But do I want to trade 10k hours of other stuff I'm already better at to do it? Once I painted them, would I truly love the work, or would I just see all the imperfections and be grumpy about it?
Artists have it hard. They spend unending hours on their passion and, in the end, see everything through a critical lens. And when they spend a month of time on something amazing, no one wants to trade a day of salary to own a copy, or a month of salary to own the original.
AI is so wildly popular because it's cheap, and through the lens of the consumer (read untrained eye), the best of it evokes emotions they get from a piece that would go for hundreds or thousands of dollars.
The true fucked up part. If the courts all say NFG, dump all your diffusion models that are full of copyrighted material. They'd just go back and commission artists in distressed places and rebuild the models from properly purchased material and we'll be right back where we are.
Still image diffusion isn't even expensive to run,
Have you considered the end result is not the purpose? The doing of art is what gives it meaning, to the artist and the viewer. It's what makes it satisfying, even if it didn't turn out how you wanted exactly.
I'm in a business that has a lot of artists. These are observations I make.
I'm also in the business of art abd I'm standing by what I said.
have a nice one
The end result is what other people see and what gets you paid. That's why people want to do it via AI.
Personally, I could sink 10k hours into whatever visual art and I'll never be good at it. I don't enjoy it either. I can only hire an expensive artist or use AI if I want something made. Since using AI art sucks, I've opted not to continue work on the video game I started work on a while ago. An alternative is to pay for asset packs from a studio that sells them, but then it's just an asset flip.
How soullessly capitalist it is to think the only purpose of art is what money you can make off of it. Who cares about meaning, the almighty dollar is the only thing important in life.
I just went to an art museum that had a bunch of Van Gogh's sunflower pieces on display, and I can assure you, AI art will never be able to invoke the kind of emotional response as I got from looking at those paintings. I'm not an artist, I haven't taken an art class since high school, so my eye is pretty damn untrained. But even I can appreciate the history of the pieces, the artist behind the work, the headspace he was in and how it affected the finished piece, the extreme conditions he had to overcome just to finish some of the pieces. That's a huge part of what evokes emotion in an art piece - knowing the story of the art and the artist. And that's something AI art will never have.
AI art is cheap, sure, but it's hollow, and people will always be able to tell that.
The first time I saw Rembrandt’s work in person I felt this sort of awe. It wasn’t just a picture of a painting in a book or an image made by a computer, they felt like time machines, a hole in the wall with a real person from the 1600s sitting on the other side looking back at me. I don’t think we need to limit ourselves to just the masters but they do a fantastic job at making a point, real art is an experience not just something to look at