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Excel logic
(lemmy.ml)
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this post was submitted on 14 Apr 2025
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Honestly, for a community (lemmy) that wanted to get away from corporate stuff (reddit) it pains me to see how even the most basic thing to draw is being delegated to Ai (corporations).
I hate this take. Not everyone can afford to pay for art or have the ability to draw.People need to get off AI's back and instead of complaining, figure out how to deal with it. Because it's not going anywhere.
Don’t talk about ability to draw as though it’s some sort of elitist trait denied to the working class. People who can draw can do so because they put the hours in.
If you can’t be bothered putting the effort in when expressing yourself, why the hell should anyone else be interested in what you have to say?
I don't have enough time to learn I have to work to try and live the bleak few hours of life I get to myself a week. honestly with AI our bosses expect more it's slowing down
You have my sympathies, but that still doesn't mean you get to post complete nonsensical garbage where a glass of water is talking for no reason, that took you less effort to create than it did to read, and expect people to not tell you to jog on, when there's a whole wealth of creative artists out there who are putting in the energy but getting their space flooded with slop.
The web has objectively become much, much worse in the past 12 months because quality is getting drowned out by quantity.
How dare Dali paint pictures with melting clocks! If the clocks really were hot enough to melt, they would set the tree they're melting on ablaze!!!!11
I get it. Artists are afraid of their income. But with those kinds of takes, "AI bad because surrealism" I can't take you seriously as an artist so I guess nothing would be lost.
Surrealism is not nonsense. It has a purpose, even if that purpose is hard to tell. If you think Dali and AI slop is the same, you don't understand either.
Fine. If it's offending your senses too much to be tame surrealism, call it dada. If you think that replacing a person with an object cannot be an artistic choice, you... well, haven't seen much art.
Note that I'm not arguing for or against AI here. I'm saying that your critique of AI is slop.
Literally nobody is saying or thinking that. What we are saying is that there is absolutely no way that OP's prompt contained "...and make the optimist BE the glass itself...".
The irony is that you're giving OP way more benefit of the doubt in your reading of what they produced than you've given me, and instead argued against a complete strawman.
So what? It's still a choice to keep this result, and not another. Artists capitalise on chance occurrence all the time.
OP is not here to defend themselves. They're also not digging themselves further into a hole.
It's not dada. It's too coherent to be dada, and it's too shit to be anything else.
In order for something to be an artistic choice, it has to be a choice. It has to have meaning and intent. AI did not choose to put a glass there, it calculated that there was probably a glass there based on shitty reasoning. AI does not have the creative capacity to make art. It can only make images, and those images are shit.
You've thoroughly proven you can't tell between slop and high art, so thank you for the compliment of my critique.
I agree!
And the same applies to cameras. That doesn't mean that photographs can't be art, though.
TBH my first instinct was trolling, especially as it's easy to overlook when you're just reading the text, not focussing on anything else. Point is when you'd hang this thing in an exhibition the audience would go all "ahh" and examine the mechanism.
The academic art world is beset nowadays with blurbs of barely intelligible critical theory to justify themselves, I find a fresh amateur artists saying "oh that's interesting, neat, let's keep it" much more interesting.
This Excel joke is pulling on 100 years of surrealist cultural history? That's incredible.
As a connoisseur, maybe you can explain why the oversized glass is talking about itself to me.
Because the artist -- the human, not the AI, that is -- decided that it should. Maybe just with a chuckle, no deeper meaning, wouldn't be the first time that happens (much to the chagrin of the academic art world).
Were they chuckling because the talking glass confuses and upsets the rule-of-three comedy technique being used?
I guess I'm talking to the crowd here because this is important: The reason this is notable evidence of AI and not human choice is because it is incoherent.
People know what a knock-knock joke is, and it wouldn't work so well to say "knock-crack" for a chuckle but still expect me to ask "who's there?" after. In comedy, and in visual art, the talking glass is an example of poor grammar.
A person, a human artist, could say knock-crack to me. Maybe they just have poor grammar generally. Maybe they did intentionally choose or ask for a giant talking cup for no reason, even though it harms the other joke they're obviously interested in telling. But I flatly don't believe this. It is far easier to believe this is random noise from the machine we already know generates random noise.
barsoap is reaching for the stars here to justify something they know is bullshit.
With some time passed, I actually have the high-brow answer you so desire:
The talking glass, which might only be spotted on a second take as the human mind first glances over the inconsistency, focussed on reading the text, challenges us to emphasise with Excel's own problems deriving meaning from the input it's given. Just as we mislooked, assumed context, so does Excel assume context, and January 17th.
That's where flowers grow that's why it's beautiful. You may dismiss it, others might quote Bob Ross and call it a happy accident, yet others might jerk off to it, talking about Jung, how the human behind the generation, in their chuckle, might not have been aware of the context of what they were producing, but channelled the collective unconsciousness' understanding of it and then wax on about the chuckle as the self-portrait, archetype, of hunches.
If you think that's BS then you should read some of the explanations that come with modern academic works of art. As in the stuff you're producing when you study art. I'm fucking holding back here, they seem to be grading by unintelligibility and length of the justification.
Is that BS? I am quite sympathetic to that notion. But that doesn't challenge its status as art.
I don't, other than it seems to be something you've written specifically to tick the boxes you think I'm looking for.
Would it baffle you to know I might consider this "critique" to be art where the image itself is not? I leave that as an exercise to the reader.
But anyway. Yet again, your contempt for the modern art world really betrays your jealousy of it. Do I just take your word for it that these critics have nothing to say?
If you think that the writings of these critics are smug, self-important hogwash, then why are you using their tools, the tools of the enemy, to justify to me why I should care about this talking cup?
Again, to the crowd: this is why what barsoap is saying is bullshit. It's just a chess move to them. They don't actually believe any of this. Their sole motivation is salvaging gen AI's reputation.
Not in the slightest. Also, how kind of you.
Nah I'm just not into the high-falutin' stuff myself. At least not in the "write an essay to accompany the work" way. Part of the craft of art, for me, is to actually express stuff in the artwork, and not as a combination of artwork+essay. I very much rather leave the thing open to interpretation, see what happens. That's entering a dialogue with whoever the audience may be instead of preaching from the pulpit, it's horizontal, not hierarchical, it does not privilege the perception of the author over that of the audience.
Yes and no? My actual stance on gen AI is simple: It's pretty much like photography. Tons of slop photographs and AI gens exist because it's so accessible, doesn't mean you cannot create art using it. Like with photography, using gen AI you have to deal with its limitations: You can't control the weather, you can't control how the AI will interpret certain things. It's limitations you have to work within, work around, with photography more physical, with AI you're putting your lens into a very weird conceptual kind of space. In either case, as an artist, you're making lots of choices, turn lots of knobs, to increase your odds but ultimately still rely on chance and throw away tons of shots which aren't quite right. It's quite a different process than drawing which is why I think so much of the critique comes from... painters. That was the case back in the days when photography was new, and it's the same now, modulo people now using graphics tablets of which I have one connected to my PC mind you just make this clear even if I can't draw for shit I'm not half-bad at sculpting. I wouldn't really dream of doing something serious with gen AI that doesn't have at least a depth map as input, there's just not enough control without that kind of thing.
Because the idea behind it is good? You're confusing art and craft. Why should anyone be interested in a urinal on a pedestal? The work is defined not by whether or not you can buy its physical representation in any random hardware store, I thought we had that one figured out.
Also there's literally zero people who would pay someone a commission to draw this piece. You're not looking at lost work you're looking at additional art. Without AI (if it is AI) it might have still existed but in stick figure form and that would be better because...? The idea has better expression as a chicken scratch? I don't think so.
It is incredible how jealous AI-hornies are of the toilet.
The toilet isn't the interesting thing, the interesting thing is how there's now authorised replicas in museums (the original is lost) signifying the discussion around art perception, not the art itself. Looking at one doesn't give you more insight than reading "and he put a urinal on a pedestal" in a textbook. It's a fucking urinal. The piece having no meaning onto itself was part of the point, it's all in the context. Yet, somehow, the replicas are authorised. A true rebel museum would forego getting an authorised one and buy a random one off the shelf, then proclaim it to be original.
You can't go into a room carrying a plucked chicken, proclaiming "behold, a human!" without there being Aristotelians around. Well you can but noone would talk about it millennia later.
This is profoundly offensive to art history, actually. A museum?
People go to great lengths to preserve CRT setups for old video games, but you're like "nah, a TV is as good as any other."
Dude, your contempt for art is insane. I'm telling you, you're jealous that I respect the profane and "meaningless" urinal and not your AI toys.
Being profoundly offensive is the only way to do the work justice. To actually recreate it is not to recreate the original form, but the reaction it caused. The very point of the work includes that any urinal is just as good as any other, so why the pretence that this particular shape, the "R. Mutt" signature, has significance?
Looking at the replicas is like praying to ashes. I'm talking about passing on the fire.
Because reinterpretation is not an art historian's job.
The original reaction is lost to time, dude. A modern audience is, broadly, already aware of the transgressive urinal, and so already more accepting of it. There is no recreating the piece. There is only recreating what it was.
I'm not talking about reinterpretation, I'm talking about faithful recreation. Archaeologists do that kind of thing, and it's valuable, why not art historians?
And judging by your reaction my suggestion indeed is the right kind of transgression to recreate the thing.
If you want it a bit more pedestrian, just in case you happen to be a museum director: Ask the janitor to go into a hardware store, and buy a urinal they like. Then tell them to write "The real Duchamp" on it, and position it on a pedestal. Attach a standard museum plaque, crediting the work to the janitor.