Now I'm wondering if this was done by a bad AI pretending to be a good artist or a good artist pretending to be a bad AI.
Poe's law is evolving!
AI “art” isn’t art. It’s just a trash bag of pieces pulled from real work that was sucked up into the model to learn from without any consent from the originators of said art. It’s fun to work with if you need inspiration to actually create art from, but it’s trash otherwise. I don’t mind people showing it off, but if you think you’re a genius because you typed a handful of prompts into a tool that far smarter people than you created, you’re on par with NFT and crypto folks. They seek the shortest route to success because they don’t want to put in the work. Art is organic and rooted in the emotion and experiences of living beings. It’s grounded in reality and understands that a human hand should have 5 digits on it and why.
It’s insanely complex and I don’t condemn the tech or the smart folks that create it, but what it generates is missing all of the organic factors that give art life. It’s being harnessed by capitalists to shut the human artists out, when it should instead be used by those artists as a tool to make their work easier.
Source: I’ve used multiple generators and have built software that uses ChatGPT and DALL-E. I’m also a digital artist.
I feel like that applies to most art.
Effort and feeling rarely show in the final piece, because most people aren't good artists and even good artists don't usually produce good art. Even what's "good" here is subjective.
I tend to agree that AI art isn't art in the way that we usually mean it, but also this is turning into a big grey area because people are using AI for touchups and stuff. Mixed media and photomontage artists have a field day I'm sure.
It really shines in things like photo retouching. The fact that you can tell it to simply erase an object is mind blowing. That’s something I had to spend hours doing manually years ago. It makes filter effects when doing digital art a breeze. That’s why I say it works better as a tool the artist collaborates with, vs making entirely from scratch. That coupling has been the perfect balance.
I use GitHub Copilot on a daily basis and it makes repetitive tasks much easier to work through. I don’t want it to write my code for me; I want it to make my work easier. The same applies in other disciplines.
This article explains it well. Marx’s theory was that the advancements of technology and manufacturing should be things that the worker maintains and works alongside with, vs a replacement for the worker. That’s where capitalism chimes in and is ruining the AI movement. It wants to eliminate the human aspect, which then removes any life. Cranking out hotel room art with AI serves a far different purpose than someone making paintings to be sold in a gallery.
Art is always going to be subjective, but part of what makes art is the sentience of the beings making it. The mass-produced AI imagery we’re seeing today is just a mix of corporate-driven plagiarism.
I absolutely agree with this take.
If AI output is or isn't art isn't an important question; what we should be asking is "does AI help artists and individuals realize their intent, or does it help the shareholders/owners take an even bigger slice of the pie?"
Yeah, it’s not the subject matter itself; it’s the way that subject matter is being bastardized. I would be a total jerk to dismiss AI as a whole. I know people that have worked with it for years in the LLM space, and they are far and away more brilliant than I could ever wish to be.
Calling pieces where an artist used an "AI" to do things like touchups "AI art" is like calling a piece where somebody used the magic wand tool "Magic Wand art." Because that's what the magic wand is - an algorithm written to identify similar elements and isolate them. That's essentially the beginning steps of an LLM. "AI" has been used in this regard for decades now, it's only that AI has become a buzz word for companies looking to replace worker skills with a cheap fascimile so that they don't have to pay their workers that has led to the concept of "AI art," by which it can be safely assumed is referring to generated images.
And I believe the word that OP was looking for is intent. As Adam Savage put it, AI art lacks intent. Whether a piece is good or bad doesn't matter, you can feel what the artist had in their head and what they wanted to express with a piece, and that's what he cares about when looking at a piece of art. When a 6 year old draws a dog, it doesn't matter whether that dog is a stick figure or a work comparable to the Mona Lisa - you know that they wanted to express that they like dogs. AI has no intent. It simply combines pieces of its data set, transforming art created with intent into a pile of different details that no longer have their original context.
You're on par with NFT and crypto folks.
They don't really care, they think they are "innovating" by doing this. I mean, this is a genuine question: why are they so amazed by an algorithm like this when they never did any art in their life? Aren't they busy coding or "X'ing" with their checkmarks?
While I think it's extremely overhyped, looking at some "AI" art communities it's clear that at least some put a lot of effort on it, going over many many iterations and tweaking the program and the results.
And anyway art is "made" by the observer, not the artist, even the results of natural processes can be art.
(AI in quotes because these tools don't deserve the name, at best High Coherence Media Transformers)
We sure do not have the same definition of art!
Art does not, in my opinion, need an observer to be art.
If you think the sky is beautiful then that does not make it art, or everything would be art so nothing would be art.
everything would be art so nothing would be art
A lot of artists share that thought
OP put the crack pipe down.
OP when someone has fun playing around with AI generators, and wants to share the nicer looking results they got:
That's fine, but ai "artists" act like their prompts(and even the images they didn't do shit to make) are things they put their heart and soul into and get so mad that they have any people calling them out
Personally I haven't seen any of that, just a lot of people butthurt (or scared for their livelyhood) that others can now make pictures with little effort.
Also some of these generated pics are the result of hundreds of trial-and-error attempts changing up the dozens of parameters and running multiple pieces of software in sequence to get the AI to spit out the wanted result.
The "Anti-AI" crowd tends to be completely ignorant on how this stuff actually works.
And some people have turned this AI stuff into their hobby, so they get defensive when you shit on them ("calling them out" as you word it)
Yeah, finding the right prompt is hard work that requires years of training 🤡
Yeah, misconstruing my comment in one sentence and slapping on a clown emoji thinking that is a genious comeback is hard work that requires years of training
It's like asking someone to make you a sandwich and then stipulating what you want on the sandwich then, once the sandwich is on a plate in front of you, you proudly exclaim "Wow, I'm quite the chef, aren't I?"
The sandwich maker in this case is just not a person, it's a computer.
I compare it to commissioning a piece and then bragging about how much effort you put into it. But that's also a really good analogy
Me when people are lying about images being generated works and submitting them to art contests and winning stuff like college scholarships:
AI "Artists" are idea guys. They don't care about the process or the knowledge or the experience of creation, only the Content that gets produced that they can consume. They're middle managers claiming the work created by the skills of the workers under them as their own effort. Image generators simply allow them to do a corporation and avoid paying people for those skills or putting in the effort to learn themselves. It's just a new form of coloring books, only created using ethically dubious methods because the companies creating the programs are likely violating fair use laws.
Edit: This isn't to say that people who use coloring books are inherently bad or anything, but when you're trying to pass your page from a coloring book off as a gallery-worthy exhibit and the book was made by a company tracing artwork and using it without permission to make a profit? Yeah, then you're a bad person. Especially if you go on to talk down to artists because you made yours so quickly, etc.
Ok it isn't that easy to get the ai do what you want. So being good at writing prompts is indeed a skill. But it is not an art skill. I mean I can get a similar result by just bullshiting words at the ai. If I draw sth. By myself it's is shitty and takes days. So well I appreciate the tool but I wouldn't call anyone an artist who uses ai without any corrections. If you edit it so it looks better maybe you are an artist. Idk
It's sad to see so many people saying that AI generated pictures are art. At the end of the day, if you don't get why art is important, you don't get it. Gonna be hard to explain to Elon's fans why the human aspect of art matters, so why bother?
I respectfully disagree with you saying ai generated images are not art, it is "a form" of art, and saying so doesn't equate to saying art is unimportant or that the human aspect doesn't matter. Art is important, the human aspect does matter a great deal. Art is about ideas and means to express them, AI-gen does allow it in different ways than previously but right now you still have a sentient being with an idea to prompt the AI.
What you are saying looks a lot like what people used to say about photography not being art, and fear mongering about photography replacing other forms of art like painting. The opposite happened, photography shaped into its own form of art, and painting evolved to new era of amazing ideas.
Let's make the term "AI images" be more popular instead
I think AI art is comparable to photography. Photographers do a lot of work behind the scenes to get everything set up, the equipment, lighting, angles, lenses, etc, But at the end of the day, the only action they're taking to capture the art is they press a button, it's not nearly the same amount of work that a painter or a musician puts into their art. So I think the idea of "capturing" art is still a valid thing. Sometimes a photographer can capture an award-winning masterpiece with a spur-of-the-moment photo on some shitty disposable camera. Maybe it took them 1000 bad photos to get that one photo, but they still just captured it from somewhere else, they didn't create the work.
Similarly with AI, a person may have to work with the AI software to setup and craft the prompt that will eventually generate the art, then there may be dozens of iterations of that and fine-tuning to get the result they're imagining, and even after that there may be some photoshopping involved to get it to where they want it. They're capturing artwork from a source that may not be their own creation, just the same as photographers. I think AI art is just as legitimate as other forms of art, it's just open to a wider range of people that can participate because many of the physical hurdles (equipment, space, time, lighting, etc) are not as much of an issue.
I think what you're describing is more like 3d rendering.
IMO using AI is more like directing in a film. You're not the one creating the art, and the level of control you have is restricted to providing guidance and retrying.
But at the end of the day, the only action they're taking to capture the art is they press a button.
Wut? Are you serious? You're just going to boil down an entire artform to that? That's an unbelievably reductive opinion.
Anyone can take a photo, sure but making art via photography is incredibly complex. I'm not a photographer at all and even I can understand that. It's the photographer's tastes and years of learning and practice that ultimately creates an impactful photo. You must think playing drums is just hitting tubes with plastic lids with sticks then, right?
I struggle to believe that you have put any thought into this opinion of yours.
Anyone can take a photo, sure but making art via photography is incredibly complex.
I think that's exactly the point. Anyone can use AI, but that doesn't make then all artists. But there is a place for AI in art, like many other tools. Same as for other tools, jusy knowing how to use them doesn't make you an artist. Just look at all the bad Photoshop stuff everywhere. Does that mean that using Photoshop makes you a talentless hack? Or just that a lot of hacks use it to pretend they're artists? Same for AI.
Photography is capturing something real in the physical world. Even if the action can be boiled down to "push a button" the photographer needs to have at least some presence where the real event is taking place.
AI art is not a depiction of a real event and requires no physical presence. It's also not being brought to life by the person taking credit for it. That's not to say AI generated images can't be cool or useful but I don't think they are art. If your definition of art is loose enough to apply to AI generated images then the I think the artist credit should belong to the AI itself or the team that wrote the software, not the person typing in prompts.
First you confirm they have to spend a lot of time to set everything up, then you claim it's just pressing a button? 🤨
Taking a picture with your phone maybe looks like that, when you don't care, but knowing one's gear and using it properly is already many levels above just pressing a button. Then only a few questions and one presses the button. Questions like: what will be blurred? what will stand out? how the picture will be composed? will colours play? or textures? are there relations between objects in the picture?
What in trying to say is: I don't agree with you, that it's just pressing a button. Programming is also just pressing buttons, right? 😉
I think the person you're replying to is trying to say that:
It's NOT just pressing a button for the people making it
But to the outsider that look at it thinks it's just pressing a button because they only see the final ending.
Of all the unsettling nonsense here, those teeth are just horrifying. Although the toe-fingers are a close second.
I kinda feel the same at times with 3d printing. I can make you rare parts or plastic piece for an appliance from scratch with my hands. I can make you a cosplay suit of armor from scratch out of foam and it'll end up looking like iron man armour. Then a guy does the same thing in a printer and goes to me "I made this on my own" and I stare at him.
I kinda get you, but ultimately the design of the printed materials had to be created by someone. Creation is the key in all of this.
In this comparison, ideally that creator is the person printing the materials. There's a disconnect if someone just downloaded the CAD files and printed it up then claimed 100% ownership of the creation credit.
I don't see anything wrong with someone designing all the pieces in CAD, which is an artform in itself IMO, printing them and proudly wearing them. Its just a different tool. You use hand tools, they used digital tools.
It's because you don't understand their vision -- classic idea guy redux
