Setting aside the usual arguments on the anti- and pro-AI art debate and the nature of creativity itself, perhaps the negative reaction that the Redditor encountered is part of a sea change in opinion among many people that think corporate AI platforms are exploitive and extractive in nature because their datasets rely on copyrighted material without the original artists’ permission. And that’s without getting into AI’s negative drag on the environment.
people forget that what makes art impressive is also the skill of the artist in the respective medium
if someone creates a perfect color gradient fill in Photoshop nobody is going to be impressed but make it with colored pencils and people may regard it as stunning
the beauty is also in the effort it took to create, not only in what the result looks like - i don’t need to take time to look at stuff people didn’t take time to make
if someone creates a perfect color gradient fill in Photoshop nobody is going to be impressed but make it with colored pencils and people may regard it as stunning
Funnily enough, that was what Mark Rothko was doing with paint. Exploring color to get the perfect shade of something. Looking at color at its most basic. That’s why those of us who understand what Rothko was going for often really love his paintings while most other people say, “I don’t get it, it’s just rectangles.”
Oh I do get it but it’s still just rectangles. If the only people who like your stuff are other painters, not other artists in general but other painters, then I think it’s fair to say that what you’re doing is 99.99% craft and maybe 0.01% art.
That kind of stuff also exists in an AI context, btw, people doing things for the heck of getting it to work and showing off technical aspects. Like absolutely a milestone when it comes to video2video, absolutely at a stage where it’s usable for artistic expression if you’re willing to work within some limitations, though the video here is much more dicking around than art. You’ll also find gazillions of AIified tiktok dances from the same crowd as tracking limbs isn’t exactly trivial.
But it isn’t “just rectangles.” That’s the point. They were slowly and meticulously constructed by layering oil paint in a way that explores the idea of what colors and color contrasts mean.
He didn’t just take a broad paintbrush and paint a rectangle.
He also suggested viewing his canvases up close, maybe a foot away, so you could see it the way he saw it.
With less skill in painting but the same artistic intent I can take a sample book of unicolour fabric with different weaves from the local textile store and put it on a pedestal: Exploring the idea of what fabric texture and texture contrasts mean.
And I’m sure clothing designers all over the world will be ecstatic… or would be, if they didn’t have store rooms full of sample books.
It is a valuable and thorough exploration of the craft is all I’m saying. He’s a Paganini, not a Ravel.
But why isn’t such an exploration a form of art?
If someone does a complicated abstract painting but uses a ruler and a protractor to achieve it, is that art?
Because I make a distinction between art and craft. You can produce extraordinarily impressive pieces of craft that have no artistic content at all, no intent nor capacity to convey a message or transform mind or anything that resembles it, you can produce extraordinary pieces of art with zero recourse to craft. Like putting a urinal on a pedestal, as I’ve mentioned quite often in this thread.
Speaking about protractors: Engineering drawings can actually be art. There’s a difference between a drawing that’s merely conveying technical information and one that is both technical and at the same time is arranged, presented, such that it does not have to be deciphered, it is capable of transforming a mind by merely being looked at, instead of having to be pondered. It’s the difference between a court file and a thrilling detective story.
So you’re claiming any image that must be deciphered isn’t art?
Here is an alternative Piped link(s):
absolutely a milestone when it comes to video2video
Piped is a privacy-respecting open-source alternative frontend to YouTube.
I’m open-source; check me out at GitHub.
Respectfully disagree. There’s a plethora of artists with exceptional skills that create photorealistic art in several mediums. While the process takes an inordinate amount of time it is completely devoid of any creative input. These are essentially human xerox machines that match color values from a photo using the naked eye. The skill is impressive, the art: not so much.
Isn’t that what the person you replied just said?
No. The person I replied to was exclusively praising skill and emphasizing its relevance to the final product. I pointed out that effort does not by default result in an original or creative product. OP dismisses effort and equates time with quality. Take for instance japanese calligraphy: the master places only a handful of strokes to render something gorgeous. On the other hand, someone could spend 80 hours meticulously recreating a photorealistic portrait in watercolor but it’s just a human xerox at that point. The human element is completely missed.
They didn’t say that though? The last paragraph made it clear (to me) that they were saying the end result isn’t the only part of at that makes it impressive, but also the effort/skill involved
I guess you’re right. I suppose this last phrase threw me off:
- i don’t need to take time to look at stuff people didn’t take time to make
The way I read it this statement stands apart from the rest of their comment. Skill is nice–I agree–but I stand by my original statement: time or effort does not by default result in an artistic product. I suppose I could have read it wrong in that the comment as a whole is a bit disjointed.
I always hated that the most upvoted art on reddit was just photorealism… Abd then the comments were all like, “Wow! I was 100% sure this was a photo until i zoom in!!!”
Yeah I agree, but with large platforms it’s inevitable for tastes to converge towards the median. A Rothko wouldn’t even register on such a platform.
I think Rothko probably doesn’t look as impressive on a phone screen either, compared to real life
This is because different people enjoy different things about art. Some people see it as a connection, hearing another person’s voice in the piece. Some love to see sacrifice, like spending hundreds of hours on creating something. Some view it almost like a sport and want to see a display of pinnacle skill. Others want the art to connect with them and their past.
people forget that what makes art impressive is also the skill of the artist in the respective medium
I bet you don’t like it when people put urinals on a pedestal.
the beauty is also in the effort it took to create
While I support your whole statement, I think the beauty of art lies in the message, vision or emotion that the artist wants to convey to the world through a visual medium. You can have a super realistic portrayal of a human and still prefer the art of Van Gogh because he shared his emotions through his art and people could feel that.
there was an ‘also’ in that sentence - and he put it there himself without leveraging other bathroom-installations-on-pedestal works
He put it there leveraging a whole urinal factory. Transported into today’s world, instead of clicking “generate” on a prompt with “urinal” on it he put “urinal” in the amazon search box, picked the first result, and then hit “buy”.
The art is in the idea, the message, the thought or impression that’s getting transmitted, the effect in the recipient’s mind (in this case it was a shitpost to troll conservatives on the one side and have a good chuckle among people who got it on the other). The rest is craft. Craft, on its own, can be fucking impressive but it’s not art.
And, of course, yes, not everyone hitting “generate” is putting a urinal on a pedestal. Much of the AI stuff out there is devoid of artistic intent, much of it isn’t even crafty, but that doesn’t mean that something being AI generated cannot be art, or that it would need craftiness to become art.
In the case of his bicycle wheel thing he went through a gazillion wheels – hitting generate a million times if you want – until he found one that was neither beautiful, nor ugly, but one that was profoundly uninteresting, “just a wheel, nothing special”. That was work, the actual work of an artist (judging the impression something makes), and with precise artistic intent – to make a statement about how art should be about engaging the mind, be not about aesthetics.
The people producing profoundly uninteresting works with AI don’t do that. Just goes on to show that the author is very much not dead.
Until one can produce work that makes an impression with some precision one has to have experience in the medium though - and different media are different regarding to what that means.
With illustration and representative art it starts with something ‘reading’ correctly, i.e. whether the intended representation even gets to the recipient. And then there are more layers on top of that getting ever more meta.
Someone who can put a urinal on a pedestal and cause an uproar in whichever direction has a lot of experience - but if a picture is just a picture or a urinal is just a urinal, it’s not worth looking at much, except for its engineering. Good art doesn’t have to be on that level though, entertainment can also be good art (but a lot of it isn’t) - there, it’s about resonance.
You’re right that craftsmanship alone cannot produce good art, there is something else driving the desire to hone craftsmanship, which is maybe to better be able to express what was impressed on the artist through life. Something that resonates with the artist is made with the hope it also resonates with other people, art is a social endeavour.
But I also feel that to a large extent, honing the craft also hones the intuition (and some knowledge as far as it can be distilled) for what makes things resonant with others. I make myself into the diffusion model to resonate with what I’m making while making it, you feel each curve you put to paper or canvas, you feel the tension in a pose, the impact of a composition - the resulting art is what’s there when that process is abandoned.
I feel like a vegan about the currently available models - once there is something made from public domain art only I’ll experiment. But right now I’m sitting in front of them like a vegan in front of sausage: For others the result is food but for them, they just see the process turning individuals into sausage.
But I also feel that to a large extent, honing the craft also hones the intuition (and some knowledge as far as it can be distilled) for what makes things resonant with others.
Oh, definitely. I’d also say that if you want to make art, starting out with AI isn’t a good idea, do literally anything else until you have developed an artistic eye: If for no other reason that it is developed faster by trying to appease even an underdeveloped one than by using it. Just to make this a bit more concrete, if you can sculpt or paint a smile that doesn’t look freaky which is a low bar aesthetically speaking but not trivial for a beginner sculptor or painter, then you can properly judge whether what AI is giving you is something resonant, or forgettable. The untrained eye putting “woman with big tiddies” in the prompt certainly isn’t going to notice finer details of a smile, what with eyes being on the tits.
I feel like a vegan about the currently available models - once there is something made from public domain art only I’ll experiment. But right now I’m sitting in front of them like a vegan in front of sausage: For others the result is food but for them, they just see the process turning individuals into sausage.
I don’t consider models learning from stuff, as in, the pixels can be accessed without a paywall or they’ve paid for that wall, as infringement. If it was then every artist who ever used reference should be in prison, and we shouldn’t.
Note that this is actually quite a different situation in diffusion models than it is with LLMs which are notorious for returning their training data verbatim: All the NYT needed to do to get their articles back is to put in the first paragraph of the article. Getty, meanwhile, is arguing their court case in the abstract because they can’t get models to reproduce their images, certainly not for lack of trying or resources. When working with the models it also quickly becomes apparent that they can abstract over concepts.
At the most it’s the difference between organic and barn eggs. Yes, organic ones are nicer. No, barn eggs aren’t terrible (depending on local regulations etc. yadayada). Vegans might disagree but, then, well, I’m flexi.
i wonder if the people downvoting you even understand the reference
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I just need to press a button and my DSLR will automatically upload the picture I took. Is photography art? Different people get different things from art. If you want to see something that took a human a hundred hours of consideration, that’s fine. But I don’t care what the artist was thinking most of the time. I care how it makes me feel. What inspiration it sparks in my mind. I’ve been moved and inspired by AI art. Admittedly I could also probably have been moved by inkblots. But people hang inkblot prints in their house because it does something for them. Art is subjective, meaning it’s more about the subject viewing it than the artist.
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You caused me no distress, I was just inspired by your comment to share my perspective.
If a machine isn’t an athlete for throwing a football, there are no athletes. If a computer can’t be a musician, there are no musicians. The line you’re drawing where a computer is worthy of being called an artist, is whether or not it was created by evolution. But there’s no technical differences between the two. Or at least there won’t be soon.
I understand you’re under a different opinion and I thank you for it. I have no need to change it.
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Typically, I don’t find anything offensive about the images ai creates. What I do take issue with is the outlandish claims of artistic ownership because they strung some words together.
Agreed. Consider this absolutely batshit take from the reddit post linked in the article.
Your art looks pretty good, so most people wouldn’t be able to tell it’s AI unless you told them it’s AI.
Generally it’s always best to just lie and tell everyone you made it yourself, just to avoid all the toxic people that hate AI, because not having to read hateful comments from people like that is reason enough to lie. Don’t need to provide any evidence or go into details, just tell everyone you made it yourself and ignore anyone that question it.
“Your art”. I’m sure clicking the “regenerate” button on mid journey for 5 hours took lots of work. It’s hard not to feel real hate for these people.
I mean I agree that AI is stolen because of its basis and all, but the 5 hours weren’t just hitting regenerate, they were likely consisting of changing extensive parameters and such. Have you seen the insanely long prompts people write that are only half comprehensible?
Whether the stuff is art is questionable, effort did go in though
That’s fair. I’ll admit I’ve not done it myself, I’ve only seen folks talking about it – and of the people I personally know that have done it, the activity has been described as clicking regenerate until you like the results.
Yeah I’m pretty against AI art as a replacement for human art, and for it’s job destroying potential, but I have friends who play around with local models, and their setup reminds me visual programming, where you move blocks of logic around.
That’s probably ComfyUI, one of the more popular open source tools. You are right, it is visual programming. Mixing text, reference images, and a lot of other items into models to output images. I can easily see someone spending hours to get a single image out of it, but then it becomes a bit of a reusable pipeline. It’s a cool tool, and, if as someone else in this comment chain said that art is a study of choice, then the output is arguably art. I’m not sure I’d go that far with it, but I have a hard time calling my programming art as well, although it meets most of the definitions of it, and is certainly a creative act.
you’re all hung up on ownership. IP is completely a result of capitalism. no one would care who used their images if we weren’t all struggling to survive in a post scarcity world. the problem isn’t AI, it’s the people that own this shit and insist that the world cling to these outdated ideas of ownership. I use AI in my art all the time. I’m an artist with 40 years of experience. I have no problem with it.
Quit bitching about AI and start dismantling capitalism (by any means necessary).
One of the saddest things I’ve seen on Lemmy is that while people here generally have sensible left wing opinions on things (the tankies aside), as soon as AI is brought up in any context most of the users seem to transform in to pearl clutching petite bourgeoisie.
What is bourgeoisie about being against AI art?
The bit where people all of a sudden become obsessed with owning intellectual property and generating passive income from it (royalties) and value people being able to monetise cultural artefacts rather than allow them to contribute to the common good.
The people “obsessed” with it are, by and large, independent and industry artists who are already struggling financially and most are definitely not making any money from royalties. They very often post their art in public spaces where they are free to view, or in Pateron for a few bucks a month. Certainly the outcry is against all of those public (but still copyrighted) works that were used to train models.
The people “obsessed” with it are, by and large, independent and industry artists
I’m not sure that’s true unless Lemmy has an incredibly strange community of whom a significant proportion are tech focused professional artists. But regardless the point I’m making is more about the mindset where people become vociferous defenders of an unjust system that benefits large corporations because they are fighting for the few scraps that they get out of it, rather than considering alternatives.
Theres a lot of nuance that exists here.
There are many consumer apps based on stable diffusion where people just type what they want “astronaut sitting on a horse” most work is below the hud and therefor i agree with your sentiment, asking something isn’t a creative process. The results is usually decent but rarely amazing but anyone can recreate it with the right prompt and seed
But things change quickly when you use proper tools like comfyui where you get full control of what the tech can do. Not all models play well with plain descriptions and prompts start to resemble a lengthy magical spell of keywords that become unreadable to a human being. Some keywords perform consistently but are highly counter-intuitive but they only work with some models and settings.
Then there are all the modifiers that change the weights and interpretation of the prompt, latent information, customize noise generations. Mix/matching multiples models iterating on the same picture, using custom or native vae, clip skip 0, 1 or 2…
During the process of changing things the results are usually utter crap but the more you understand what your doing the closer you will get to a workflow that can consistently output good images.
A last step is taking the parameters/seed that generated best pictures from a batch and editing the prompt/settings further to fix the last details.
The process is a creative one and the result is impossible to recreate without someone knowing exactly all the steps involved so here i would say artistic ownership can be applied.
I like naunce so I do appreciate your post. I dream of a world where AI can assist all sorts of creatives bringing their imagination to life so they can share their inner world with others. If we go back to my OP, though, I stuck that word outlandish in there purposefully. Often these AI artist will have some hokey back story where you know they are attributing the AI’s creativity as their own.
I’ve never found an AI image itself offensive. It’s people shortcutting for profit and clout that irks me.
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Thats an unfair comparison. Were not talking about “painters” or “illustrators” but using the very general term “artist”
I literally started by saying i agree that just asking sm premade like bing to generate x with y isnt making art.
But there can be deep creative processes involved in getting an ai to generate just right and any actual professionals i do know use AI will more often then not use photoshop edits as parts of their process. The ai is a tool.
If you are intentionally using creative process to create an imagined output then you are by dictionary definition an artist.
Stable diffusion is also much more a technology then a product, anyone with a decent gpu can train their own models and many people have. Using someone elses models is no different then using someone else’s brushes in a painting program because what counts is what you do with it, which often involves alot more then just typing in a prompt.
If you want some examples of the creative freedom and complexity one can get just search for “comfyui workflow”
In your sport example, if you managed to step for step guide and train a basic robot (so not a toy preconfigured to play sports)into properly playing sports you wouldn’t perse fit the dictionary for an athlete but you having the knowledge to do this could create a reasonable assumption that you are. Otherwise i would say amateur-engineer could also apply because you probably need to know a lot about how the robot joints function. At the very least i would call you an artist because it would take a lot of creative trial and error to pull off.
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Well that’s very interesting for me personally to think about. Thanks for bringing this up.
I always really enjoyed programming but i hated being a developer.
Ive always loved making art but objectively suck at painting, not great at drawing while i am pretty good with computers, i’ve long realized i can use that to scratch my creative itch as opposed to traditional tools. I have dabbled in 3d modeling, scripting, creating custom theming, general indie game development but my real long time dream is opening a workshop where i reconfigure old hardware into cool looking contraptions operating silly programs that serve no practical use besides inspiring joy.
When i worked as a developer i was assigned a task and told to program x or y within z limits and standards. I had no creative freedom and really hated that job for that reason.
i guess when it comes to how i work with ai its fair to compare it to being a programmer much more then a conventional painter, it definitely taps into my technical insight on a similar level, but it does much more then scripting scratch my very real itch to create things.
On principle I’ve always been very openminded to what art can be, a literal toilet can be art so i also considered that the thoughts of a philosopher are art. Writing is art, cooking can be art, Video games are art.
Its absolutely ok to make distinctions yourself, if art is anything at all it is subjective but i hope you can see that following my logic i don’t see why my creative projects wouldn’t count towards the definition.
Everyone who has written a book: “HEY!”
Brief description = book
TIL
Imagine if anyone who commissioned a piece of artwork took sole credit for that art.
You’re a blast at parties, I’m sure
Sure, because as someone with social anxiety I can tell you all I ever dream of is going to parties.
Mood
All it takes to write a book is to string some words together?
Flagpole masonry tick Persepolis a reciprocity.
I’m an author!
See, now you’re getting it!
You are. A crappy one, but you’re an author. Try to do better.
Gatekeeping words like “artist” and “author” is very nasty. My 3 year old makes art. He’s bad at it but if I tell him he’s not an artist he’ll stop and who knows what could have happened. I choose to encourage him.
He also write like you did. And I encourage him to do better.
I don’t think saying “if you put random words together with no context, you’re not an author” is gatekeeping. It’s defining a term.
And I absolutely gatekeep the idea that anyone’s three-year-old is an artist or an author. Those are things that take skill.
My friend always said “if you can’t see it live with instruments it’s not music and they’re not musicians” and I disagreed with that for the same reason I disagree with you saying making art takes skills. I hope that makes sense. Making good art and popular art might take skill, but anyone can be an artist, anyone can be an author. “Anyone can cook.”
We can agree to disagree.
So a person who picks up a saxophone for the very first time is a musician? Really?
Sure, why not. Art teachers always defined art as the expression of an idea, and playing the saxophone for the first time is definitely that. Talent, time, skill and knowledge does not enter in this label as far as I’m concerned.
Now you’re not John Zorn but, hey, maybe you’ll be later with some perseverance and dedication. Edit: Or maybe you’ll become Duke Silver and you’ll be happy enough doing that. We need both in the world.
I disagree with the other poster, I’d say your child is an artist making maybe the purest form of art in the world, taking their life experience and putting it to paper. I’d dare to say that letting them type out a random prompt and getting a decent image out of their limited vocabulary would be much less impactful than the most crude stick figure drawing of the two of you together.
“I feel like a lot of the anti-AI people just… want there to be less beautiful art in the world,” one Redditor replied in the same thread.
The beauty of, what, mutations caused by a nuclear accident?
This was the craziest quote to me:
“I hope someday being anti-AI is seen as ableist,” another mused.
WHAT.
Just…FUCKIN WHAT.
These people just want to be able to sell their AI art alongside other artists, because they “spent 6 hours to get only 5 images” is obviously on par with someone who has spent years honing their skills and craft the create art on a canvas or other blank medium.
Some AI art is pretty interesting, but let’s not equate it being the same as someone with actual creative talent.
Yeah like also, if you’re doing art for validation – you’re not doing art.
Is everyone who posts anything online just looking for validation?
Some of them are also looking for money.
This is maybe the must frustrating argument I’ve seen, there are TONS of artists with disabilities work within their limitations to create art that is utterly unique and representative of their physical and mental struggles and triumphs.
Funny, just this morning I woke up to someone commenting on one of my pieces of art that I’d posted on Reddit that if I hadn’t put in the comment how I did it, they’d have thought it was an AI generated picture.
It’s super-painful to be a technologist and an artist at the same time right now because there are way too many people in tech who have no understanding of what it means to create art. There’s people in the art community who don’t really get AI either, of course, but since they are trending towards probably the right opinion based on an incomplete understanding of what the things we see as AI actually are, it’s much easier to listen to them. If anything, the artists can labor under the misapprehension that the current crop of AI tools are doing more than they actually are.
In the golden age of analog photography, people would do a print and include the raw borders of the image. So you’d see sprocket holes if it’s 35mm film or a variety of rough boundaries for other film formats. And it was a known artistic convention that you were showing exactly what you shot, no cropping, no edits, etc. The early first version of Instagram decided that those film borders meant “art” so of course they added the fake film borders and it grated on my nerves because I think it was the edges from a roll of Velvia, which is a brilliant color slide film. And then someone would have the photo with the B&W filter because that also means “art” but you would never see a B&W Velvia shot unless you were working really hard on a thing. So this is far from the first time that a bunch of clueless people on the tech side of the fence did something silly out of ego and ignorance.
The picture I posted is the result of a bunch of work on fabbing, 3D printing, FastLED programming, photographic technique, providing an interesting concept to a person and an existing body of work such that said person would want to show up to some random eccentric’s place for a shoot, et al. And, well… captions on art exist for a reason, right? It adds layers to the work to know that the artist was half-mad when they painted it and maybe you can tell by the painting’s brushwork or just know your art history really well but maybe you can’t and so a caption helps create context for people not skilled in that particular art.
And, there’s not really “secrets” in art. Lots of curators and art critics will take great pains to explain why Jackson Pollock or Mark Rothko so if you are still wandering around saying “BUT IT LOOKS LIKE GIANT SQUARES” that’s intentional ignorance.
Now, I’ve been exploring my particular weird genre of art for a while now. Before AI, Photoshop was the thing. Much in the same way as I could have thrown a long enough prompt into a spicy-autocomplete image generator, I also could have probably photoshopped it. Then again, the tutorials for the Photoshop version of the technique all refer back to the actual photographic effect.
Describing something as it’s not has long been a violation of social norms that people who are stuck in a world of intentional ignorance, ego, and disrespect for the artistic process have engaged in. In the simultaneous heyday of Second Life and Flickr, people wanting to treat their Second Life as their primary life caused Flickr to create features so people could mediate this boundary. So, on one level, this isn’t entirely new and posting AI art in the painting reddit is no different from posting filtered Second Life to the portrait group on flickr. It’s simple rudeness of the sort that the unglamorous aspects of community moderation are there to solve for.
I have gotten quizzed about how I make my art, but I’ve never seen anybody go off and then create a replica of my art, they’ve always gone off and created something new and novel and interesting and you might not even realize that what got them there was tricks I shared with them it’s so different. Artists don’t see other art in the gallery and autocomplete art that looks like what they saw, they incorporate ideas into their own work with their own flair.
Thus, there’s more going on than just mere rudeness. I’ve been doing this for a long time now and the AI companies have a habit of misrepresenting exactly what content they have stolen to train their image models. So it’s entirely likely that the cool AI picture that someone thinks my art looks like is really just autocompleted using parts of my art. Except I can’t say “no” and if there was a market for people making art that looks roughly like mine, I’d offer paid workshops or something.
Well now I want to see some of your work. It sounds interesting as hell
Well, the photo in question is: https://www.flickr.com/photos/cyberspace/53570370332/
Not to be off topic… but… Your username… wirehead… its dark and disturbing and absolutely i love it!
We, the people who all roughly simultaneously chose the same name at roughly the same time only to engage in endless wars over who gets it on a new site, actually exist in a diverse multi-gendered animal-loving book-reading population, of which I am only one example, merely the member of our tribe who happened to nab it here. I’ve actually talked with other Wireheads and the similarities are interesting.
All I know is that it somehow appeared in my brain before I read the Niven book that introduced it to me. And, also, at this point in history, I find Niven and many people who operated in his orbit deeply disgusting and disturbing examples of humanity, so it’s good that I came up with it on my own.
Which is funny cuz I’ve seen better ai art generated in 10 min on my laptop via CPU trained ai. Why is your photo you generated any more valid than the pic I generated? It isn’t. We both did the same thing. We used a machine to make art.
You’re really just pissed because mines better.
Also only llms are trained on web content and it is not stealing under any definition of the word. Their AI just looked at work presented online for free like any other not or user. None of that is illegal. Using the training data to recreate similar works is also not illegal as of right now.
Asking a computer to create an image is fundamentally different from constructing a scene and photographing it. One is using a machine, skill, talent and creativity to create art. The other is having a machine generate art for you.
Do you think art is maybe more about the process of creating and physically manifesting your thoughts and emotions? Like maybe art isn’t just about the end product but the joy of creation?
If you think this debate is about which one is “better” you have fundamentally missed the point. Disregarding the AI aspect entirely, art is subjective. “Better” is completely meaningless in that context. Is it more technically proficient? Better composed? Even if answers match, it could be for entirely different reasons between people. And then there are people who will disagree entirely. There is no objective measure. So then, what is the point of art?
It’s different for everyone, and it just so happens that a significant portion find AI generated compositions hollow on top of being unethical.
I wrote a small bulk file management tool that I needed for my work. I wrote it in an easy language (javascript+nodejs). It got the job done and took maybe an hour. But I noticed its flaws and imperfections. So i made a new tool in a very hard to learn language (rust) its taken me months and is already moderately better. In ~2 weeks I will have a tool that I am satisfied with enough to post on the internet for anyone to use.
I could’ve posted my original (crude hammer of a) tool online months ago because, on a basic level they do the same thing regardless of how pleasant it feels to use. Have it posted online to be thrown into a pit full of other tools that do similarly wacky things that are interesting for all of 10 minutes. Tools that slowly break over time. Tools that are silently forgotten.
Great insightful comment, thanks!
Maybe an unpopular opinion, but I like AI art. It can be fun and interesting, I play around with a couple engines myself. I occasionally use the imagery to kick-start my imagination or as inspiration for things I might be working on or thinking about. It’s useful to give your brain a “starting point.”
What I don’t like is people trying to pass off AI computer generated images as some form of accomplishment for themselves (excluding working out a good prompt or modifiers, that can be a bit of work) or trying to pass off the imagery as real in any way. Real IRL or like “I painted this.”
As far as the corporate models scraping content…yeah, they are definitely playing the usual game that it’s ok for them to fuck over the little guy but heaven help you if you’re a day late with a payment to them or torrent a movie.
Art is a key branch of human endeavour that can be described as “the study of choice”. That’s what so many people misunderstand in modern art, is that it’s often more focused on the choices themselves rather than trying to be a skillful representation or depiction of some kind. “That’s just a ___, my kid could do that.”
What is missing from every conversation about AI art is what contribution to “the study of choice” can be made here. There are a thousand variables in the choices made along the way, from which AI and training data was used, to the myriad of prompts used. I am certain that if you were thoughtfully making these choices along the way with a clear idea in mind, you’d be able to make incredibly impactful art that actually enriches us in the usual sense that good art can.
My complaint about AI here, if we will set the enormous scale of theft to one side, is simply that it is being used to create art that doesn’t mean anything, which is inimical to the pursuit of art itself.
My complaint about AI here, if we will set the enormous scale of theft to one side, is simply that it is being used to create art that doesn’t mean anything, which is inimical to the pursuit of art itself.
Thank you.
The meaninglessness and soulelessness is a big part of the problem with AI art.
It has no more “point of view” than a random number generator.
So it won’t be popular. But then there is AI art that’s popular isn’t there? Did a landscape have a point of view when someone took a picture of it? No. But the photographer and everyone that saw something in it afterwards did. The viewer can give the piece meaning. It’s well known that art is subjective. That means you, the subject, determine if what you’re seeing is evoking emotion.
For what it’s worth, I don’t think the brain is magic. So someday something synthetic will have a complex opinion and express it metaphorically. Maybe we’re already there, just not on a human level. Could a rat make art? Because at some point soon computers are going to be on the spectrum of intelligence of a living thing, if it’s not already.
I really like that description! The study of choice. I think that under that lens I’ll be able to appreciate art in a new way. Thanks.
Someone really smart said it to me a few months ago and it changed my world
Fair enough. AI art is often just a highly skilled visual meme generator used in a reactionary manner to whatever is happening at the time, whether it be denim-infused fediverse posts or mocking political figures.
Other than a few drop-down menus that aren’t any better than an iPhone photo filter app, yeah, all the choices have essentially been already made and recombined by the art generation software.
A lot of the more technical art generators seem to have a lot fewer fixed parameters. The failure to put in the effort to learn about them and make those choices is what I’d argue makes most AI art inherently worthless.
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Depends on the workflow, in my opinion. There are people who just type “1girl lol” into a text box and there are some people who set up workflows with hundreds of steps including significant manual work done in Photoshop or GIMP.
Similarly nearly all music these days is made with a DAW, which enables you to selectively edit and combine performances that otherwise you wouldn’t be able to achieve. Drummer off beat? Quantize it. Want a string section but don’t know how to play violin? Use a synth. And certainly there are people who are overly reliant on those tools because their core music abilities aren’t very strong.
If you think any amount of computer assistance means that something isn’t art, then basically all music made since the 90s would also not be art. It’s not a binary. Any tool can be used tastefully or be used to mask an underlying lack of talent.
You don’t usually call the audio engineer a musician though. The fact that you “want a string section” is the important part. Art is communication, if you fuck with the AI until it communicates what you want, that can be art, as long as you’re not trying to pass off that the fake brushstrokes contain any meaning. If you learn all the right prompt words to make it “good” and then Photoshop it to fix all the telltale AI glitches but the only idea being communicated comes from 6 random people on Deviantart smashed together, that’s not art.
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I’d welcome you to offer a rigorous definition of this supposedly well-known distinction. Computers don’t generate anything spontaneously. They always require some level of direction.
Are the outputs of VSTs not “computer generated”? You can fumble around on a keyboard just moving up and down until you find the pitch you want, and the software will output an orchestral swell of dozens of instruments that take years and years to master, with none of that effort expended by the one mashing the keyboard.
Is that sound computer-assisted or computer-generated in your estimation? Much the same with AI images. It’s not fundamentally different from any other computerized tool.
That’s pretty reductive and bad comparison. Your example boils down to saying that you could argue guitarist is a machine assisted.
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I said in my original post that just typing a prompt isn’t an example of skill. I stated that there are people who use both AI and non-AI tools in complex workflows that include a ton of manual work, and in those cases it’s disingenuous to write off the process as not being creative.
I’m not sure exactly what you’re arguing against, but it isn’t the position I took. Seems like a reading comprehension issue.
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Would you call a person that creates paintings by cutting images from magazines an artist?
What if the person cuts the images from AI generated content?
The issue with your categorical “no nuance” stance is that there is nuance in the world.
I just call the people in my Discord who generate AI images AI Handlers because to me it’s like getting a half trained unruly animal to do what you want. That being said when they take requests for character art for tabletop games they put out some good stuff. It’s just a tool to be used and it often takes an experienced handler to get what you want out of it.
I’d be perfectly fine being called an AI Handler over an artist, its an apt descriptor and I’m not doing this to trick anybody. One of the top posts on all today is about true luxuries, and one of them is the Luxury of being able to fully express ones self, to which this new tool has provided to me faaar more than any tool previous. If I’m sharing my creations its because I’m excited to have a visual representation and I want to share it with those interested, I’m not trying to downplay the skillset of other artists, nor do I care about cred. I’m just excited to finally have an outlet for my creativity that doesnt require me to devote years of my life to learning specific skills before I’m able to start doing what I actually want to do, which is to be creative
I don’t really think you’re expressing much of yourself with an AI, especially creativity. I mean all the power to you if you think so, but you can’t really claim to be anything more than a slightly less cumbersome Google image search bot.
Basically you give “search terms” and then use your judgement to pick and choose. There’s very little expression and a whole lot curating of someone else’s work. I guess if you think making music playlist is an expression of creativity, sure it’ll qualify. But that’s some shallow expression of a personality when it comes to art. Might want to phrase that differently.
Lmao, I could’t give less of a shit what you think about my own feelings of creative expression. Have a nice day!
How does this argument not also apply to photography? A modern camera is a computer, you fiddle with the settings, press a button and it automatically makes a picture for you. People produce billions of shitty photographs a day which aren’t art, but that doesn’t mean someone working in photography as a medium can’t be an artist.
In my experience it’s only non-artists who make this argument, because in their heads they’re comparing AI to painting. But for visual artists there are tons of mediums and disciplines where you don’t physically make the marks yourself and it’s the concept and composition that’s important.
There was an exhibition of AI generated art at the big local gallery here last year and I expected artist friends to be against it, but they were just like “oh, that’s interesting”. They just see AI generation as another way of creating an image and whether a particular image is or isn’t art depends on the intention not the process.
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Taking medium into account changes everything. A sculpture artist or painter doesn’t have the same interest or concern about AI art yet, and may never. They also tend to not have the same comprehensive view of AI generation as well as training data.
That being said, digital photography doesn’t remotely compare. If I were to set my DSLR up with a lens, set an F stop and shutter speed, the results would be similar to that of a film camera. A sensor takes in light in the same way film does. A 30 second exposure at a 500 ISO will compare to a 30 second camera on a certain film type, which is comparable to ISO settings.
Artificially bumping up light sensitivity on a DSLR degrades image quality. Analog and digital are largely comparable. So how would it apply to photography? It’s not just automatically making a picture, and if it were doing that on auto, it’s still not all that different from a film photo with generic catch all sensors and light metering.
Photography is all about catching the moment, personally I captured night landscapes via manual long exposure on a DSLR, but none of that is automatic.
If you use commands to tell an AI to make a piece of art, you’re somewhere between a programmer and a manager I think.
Ok so edm and electronic music isn’t music…ok buddy. Nice definition.
AI that generates music and humans producing electronic music / EDM have nothing in common.
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AI art is like the speech synthesiser that came with Amiga’s Workbench. Amusing for yourself to make it say swears, but of no interest to anyone else.
Ventrilo tts
My helicopter goes soisoisoisoisoisoisoi
Until it becomes part of the samples/loops for a whole new genre of music two decades later. Like the TR909 drum machine and the popular “amen break” rhythm line.
Yeah no one will ever have any use for synthesized voice. It’s like the drum machine, just a silly gadget which will never have any impact on music…
Hmmm.
Ai image gen will continue to improve, a kid born today will likely grow in a world where they’re completely used to game render engines using generative ai, where they design complex and beautiful virtual worlds, and where art lessons focus more on design and expression than technical skill (which people interested in will learn with thy help of ai tools).
You’re welcome to feel however you like about new technologies but don’t tattoo your idea that ai image gen is just a fad because it won’t age well.
I think there are interesting aspects of AI art. It takes a real artist to properly instruct an AI to create something new, different, and interesting. When I think of modern art, a lot of art snobs were dismissive of it because “it’s not art.” I think we will see the same opinions of AI art change as new, different, and interesting artwork is made.
Thing is, generated art is not new or different. It’s a machine amalgamation of existing works. The only vaguely interesting bits are how it mangles body parts into some kind of Cronenberg horror.
Humans certainly don’t make new things out of nothing. They also take from different sources and combine them together to make something new, whether that’s direct inspiration or on a more abstract level through the brain.
Learning models aren’t generating art any more than GIMP or Photoshop is. It’s the person behind the tool that makes the art, not the tool. There’s certainly an art to prompt smithing.
I feel like a lot of people dismiss generated art simply because it’s new (and because as a byproduct is spits out dozens of junk pieces before getting anywhere good). I don’t see how it’s that different from someone using photo-editing software built with dozens of algorithms instead of a ‘pure’ drawing pad, or someone using a drawing pad instead of a pencil, or someone using a pencil instead of chalk. It’s a tool, and a great one at that in comparison to many digital tools for artists.
People dismiss AI art because they (correctly) see that it requires zero skill to make compared to actual art, and it has all the novelty of a block of Velveeta.
If AI is no more a tool than Photoshop, go and make something in GIMP, or photoshop, or any of the dozens of drawing/art programs, from scratch. I’ll wait.
Then those same people will also dismiss bananas taped to the wall for requiring “zero skill” and thus out themselves as having no idea what art actually is.
The true artist was the guy who ate the banana.
Different kind of art.
Art is art, no matter the medium or author. City bureaucrats building a parking lot, and only a parking lot and not commissioning an admonishing memorial or something, can be art if it’s at the place of Hitler’s bunker.
People dismiss AI art because they (correctly) see that it requires zero skill to make compared to actual art, and it has all the novelty of a block of Velveeta.
I look at art because I find it pretty, not because someone toiled over it for hours on end. Sure, I respect the artist who made it and think their effort commendable, certainly worth a sum of money, but if something is made such that the art of the craft requires less skill and time surely that is a good thing?
Novelty of the tool doesn’t matter. What’s new changes daily, and the point of a tool is not to be new but to be useful.
If you mean the art itself that is generated being samey or problematic in that sense of non-uniqueness, I disagree wholeheartedly. You can do a lot with learning models, and the sameness people perceive is from inexperienced novices dipping their hands in and flooding the ecosystem with beginner works, in much the same way DeviantArt was once flooded with drawings on the level of stick figures and box people.If AI is no more a tool than Photoshop, go and make something in GIMP, or photoshop, or any of the dozens of drawing/art programs, from scratch. I’ll wait.
A hammer is a tool, and so is an electric jackhammer. You don’t tell a construction worker to go use a hammer when an electric jackhammer gets the job done far better and far more efficiently, and not everyone is suited to using a hammer just as not everyone is suited to using an electric jackhammer. They also have different purposes, but certainly the electric jackhammer did replace some of the uses the hammer once had, but it doesn’t make the hammer obsolete. I view learning models that generate art in the same manner as an electric jackhammer. Useful and powerful, but ultimately lacking in refinement and the work will certainly need other tools to finish the job.
This phrase of yours just doesn’t mean much. I don’t see how making something in GIMP proves anything for anyone?
I don’t see how it’s that different from someone using photo-editing software built with dozens of algorithms instead of a ‘pure’ drawing pad, or someone using a drawing pad instead of a pencil, or someone using a pencil instead of chalk. It’s a tool, and a great one at that in comparison to many digital tools for artists.
It is different because a person isn’t involved, it’s a machine outputting the information without intent whatsoever (as machines do)
That’s not true though— extensive effort is put into prompting, parameter tweaking, etc.
Compared to how much effort it takes to learn how to draw yourself? The effort is trivial. It’s like entering a Toyota Camry into a marathon and then bragging about how good you did and how hard it was to drive the course.
It’s commendable to be good at something that requires a lot of effort. Making a hut with your bare hands is a lot more impressive than making a hut with all the construction tools of the modern day at your disposal. However, so what? I’d still rather have a house made with modern tools because it’s cheaper and more efficient for everybody involved.
I think there already is AI art but it’s not the art that everyone is talking about, it’s not your run-of-the-mill fantasy illustration prompt but people exploring what can be made with tools like that.
Rather than focusing on emulating traditional illustration, they invent their own processes and that is the work.
AI art is, by very definition, average.
It’s the best fit line. It’s the most common. The mean or the median.
The best art is exceptional.
Wow this really succinctly describes what I feel whenever I see AI art. It’s just an overwhelming feeling of indifference.
Average AI art is average. Exceptional AI art is exceptional.
People who use AI as the tool it is, rather than just feeding it a single prompt and taking a few good results, can make art just like any other artist using a tool. Some of that art is exceptional. Most of it is average. Just like any other tool.
The best AI art is often the result of multiple passes with inpainting and refining, and touchups in other tools. But that takes time, effort, and skill. Just like any other tool.
LMFAO “uhm ackshually guys AI art takes skill just like human art”
yeah bud, spending 30 minutes typing sentences into the artist crushing machine is grueling work
That’s not how most people using it creatively are doing it though, have you seen the actual workflows people use? Inpainting and stuff, it can be just as involved as collage or other artforms.
For real, most of the people in this thread have no idea how any of these tools work.
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Wow, it’s like I’m back on reddit.
Any example of exceptional AI art?
Art is subjective. What I find impactful or meaningful may not be what you find impactful or meaningful. I’ll just say I’ve seen exceptional AI art, but it’s rare.
I can’t remember the specifics, but I do recall there was a work that won some art contest and then had its win revoked because AI generation was used in its creation. I recall really liking that piece.
Edit: I find it remarkable that anyone would downvote what I said in this post. The other I get, you all have your notions and aren’t going to change your minds, that’s fine, I get it. But nothing I said in this post was controversial.
I fully agree with you. However, there’s no point bringing it up here in this echo chamber of luddites. They’re deathly afraid of ai (for no real reason), and it really shows.
I’m not afraid of AI and I’m certainly not a luddite my friend. I used to lecture about technology in art on several university courses.
I’ve used algorithms to generate work that has been shown on an international stage, and used computers to run massive participatory art shows.
I currently work in publishing, and I can’t express how much AI has already impacted the landscape through generative text. It doesn’t compete with traditional authors, it just smothers them through sheer volume. It clogs up submission processes and it fills open calls… And nearly every one using generative methods thinks they should be called an “author” just because they put a few words into a prompt.
There really is a reason I hold this point if view and it is based on experience and education as well as being part of an industry that this is already having an impact on.
If you want me to take you seriously, I’m going to need some real discussion around the firm that goes beyond name calling and vague statements.
I honestly don’t give a fuck whether you take me seriously or not. As a luddite and technophobe, your opinion means less than nothing to me.
Doesn’t change the fact that you’re afraid of AI though. It is gonna change things, and just because you’re afraid of it isn’t going to stop it. I suggest you learn to adapt.
Bet you are into NFTs too, huh?
Not really. Were you?
Nah this is just an epidemic of lazy people who want the credit of being called an artist without putting in any of the work.
Nah its an epidemic of cowards who are afraid of things they don’t understand. Here’s some advice. Educate yourself, and maybe try to understand things before making stupid statements.
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lol imagine being scared of autocomplete. What a time to be alive.
“I feel like a lot of the anti-AI people just… want there to be less beautiful art in the world”
I certainly don’t want to speak for all “anti-AI people”, but personally …yeah.
Even before the generative AI boom, you could find an essentially limitless stream of artworks on the internet. If you exposed yourself to that for long enough, you’d eventually go numb to things just being beautiful for the sake of being beautiful.
Occasionally, you’d stumble over expressive art, which had a meaning beyond that, which conveyed an emotion, which was a labor of love and/or hatred.
Even before the generative AI boom, this expressive art was buried under heaps of profitable artworks, because artists were taking the second-best option for pursuing their passion.So, while I would’ve preferred less profitable artworks and more expressive art, I was always perfectly fine with it, because I knew it was humans doing the necessary.
Now with generative AI, it’s just yet another magnitude more artworks thrown on top, with even less meaning.
Where a missing finger might have been a powerful expression of the artist’s struggles, now it’s just an every-day-defect of the AI.It just buries the expressive art even further, obstructs any meaningfulness and makes me even number to beauty. I absolutely do not care for a greater quantity of art. I want greater quality, and not in terms of beauty.
AI image tools are useful for one thing and one thing only.
Putting Godzilla in the most ridiculous situations possible.
https://forums.mst3k.com/t/dall-e-fun-with-an-ai/24697/7734
Start at the bottom. It doesn’t start with Godzilla, but eventually we discovered the true meaning of AI image creation. Also because it’s getting close to 8000 posts at this point.
We really like putting Godzilla in ridiculous situations.
I like the idea that AI art is for art that wasn’t worth having a human create. Does it make sense for a human to create pictures of Godzilla in ridiculous situations? If you’re feeling really inspired, then go for it, but nobody should otherwise feel obliged to spend an afternoon on it.
A little while ago, I created a LLM Vogon poetry generator for a Hitchikers themed party. Is it worth having a human create intentionally bad poetry for a party? I would again say no. Even there, though, a lot of people didn’t like it. Partially because they were afraid of just how bad Vogon poetry could be, but there was some clear dislike of anything associated to AI, even for this silly use case.
Not terrible, usable as rough concept art but not nearly good enough to be reference. While the general likeness has consistency there’s inconsistencies in the eybrows and ears and don’t get me started on the costumes they’re all plain different.
The main issue I have here, knowing that it’s AI, is whether he’s holding his blade by the, well, blade because he’s just that kind of vampire or because the AI messed up and the human didn’t notice.
What your link points me to. Do i need an account to see them?
I have no idea but yes I didn’t delete my account. Here’s a link to the thread on old.reddit.com, it’s the link in the top comment.
Something is interfering with your DNS or traffic, loads fine for me.
Same issue. Does this work?
Nvm. Looks like you have to access it from the thread and not here?
If you read this thread closely, the problem isn’t AI, it’s capitalism and its extractive design.
Honestly, just pass a law saying you’re not allowed to use a model that was trained using non public domain material.
Voila, AI can be permitted without robbing existing artists and artists still have a monopoly on new material.
Um, good luck trying to get that law passed.
This just in: thieves realize law means that they aren’t supposed to steal, theft rate collapse to 0%.
Also those signs at school campuses saying they are a “no gun zone” means school shootings are officially a thing of the past. Phew, why didn’t we think of this earlier?
This just in, local dumbass forgets that the point of it being a law is to throw assholes who do it anyways in jail for being the assholes they are!
Aw, you don’t have to refer to yourself in the third person like that
Almost a full day to think about it and the best you could come up with is “no u”
Imagine thinking that I sat around all day to think about this conundrum. L m f a o. Some of us have lives beyond the internet, sweetheart <3
Does anyone want anyone’s art? Has any artist other than the rare 0.01% ever been sought out or recognized? How is this any different?
I think pretty much every artist is recognized to an extent.
“Redditors vent and complain”
News at 11.
