9 ms·

> People will insist that SD art isn't real art. Artists will fight back, and lose. When talking about Stable Diffusion and art there are usually two different

> People will insist that SD art isn't real art. Artists will fight back, and lose. When talking about Stable Diffusion and art there are usually two different aspects of art. I am not going to try to define art, but sometimes we refer to art as illustration, or stock images (what SD puts in danger) and some as broad modern art. I am no trying to say that one is more valuable than the other, but want to qualify these two, because some art is not painting pretty pictures. In the modern art interpretation artists will not lose to SD. SD will enable them to do different things. There are many examples of famous artists that commission the execution of an artwork fully, without painting, sculpting or doing any other work. I remember an example of an artist paying illegal immigrants to hold a wall (that could not stand by itself) in a gallery, to touch on social issues. I am not an expert in art. My point is, in modern art SD will be one tool more (although it might create new influences) at the service of the human that gives it meaning.

rco8786 4y ago
Worth noting that this is also currently on the HN front page: https://waxy.org/2022/09/online-art-communities-begin-banning-ai-generated-images/ https://waxy.org/2022/09/online-art-communities-begin-bannin...
- mejutoco 4y ago
  Interesting one, thanks. By the nature of it that art community excludes huge areas of art (concept art, performance art, land art, …). Basically anything that is not a 2d image (sometimes animated) on a screen. To me it matches exactly what I meant with the first type of art, although I admit it is a crude categorisation. If they charged a small amount per submission probably the would stop users submitting 40 images per second.
- ben_w 4y ago
  Huh, was not expecting Fur Affinity to be a poster child for such a ban. The surprise is not because it’s furry — the art scene is such a large fraction of the furry economy that the introduction of AI art is approximately equivalent to introducing modern farming to, IDK, the 1850s or something — but rather because of that site’s lack of reputation with regards to technology. Although, perhaps that explains why the quotation is “That content generated can reference hundreds, even thousands of pieces of work from other artists to create derivative images.” rather than the billions in the training sets.
  - Paracompact 4y ago
    This was actually predictable, if one was listening to the buzz around the different communities when the "this waifu/pony/fursona/etc. does not exist" generators were first introduced. Every community seemed to love the spectacle, except for the furry community, who were noticeably more on edge about it. I still don't really know what to attribute the attitude to, but it seems to be a pattern.
    - ben_w 4y ago
      As I said, the surprise is that particular website, not that specific fandom. The fandom is unsurprising for the reason I gave.
      - Paracompact 4y ago
        The pony and anime communities also revolve around an economy of mostly static 2d art, for what it's worth.
gizmo 4y ago
I think the sad reality is that modern art is largely trash. Perhaps because painting/drawing/sculpting with excellent technique is too much of a commodified trade already. Perhaps because it's too hard to be original. A new oil painting of a tree, no matter how well executed, won't draw people to an art gallery. So artists take refuge in social commentary: A banana taped to a wall. A naked person holding a trash barrel. Two bicycles welded together upside down. Or your example of undocumented people holding up a wall. But do these artists have anything insightful to say about inequality or exploitation? No. It's always trite, reductive, and utterly unoriginal. The truth is that "statement art" is, almost without exception, just bad art, but people wrongly believe that: (a) there must be a deeper meaning to it that they don't understand or (b) people who say art is bad are philistines. And if art is just supposed to make you think, even when the artist didn't have any deep thoughts themselves, then SD art can easily meet that benchmark. SD art will be good enough to decorate your home and office with. SD art will hold its own in art galleries, if it doesn't already. That's much broader than stock photography.
- enord 4y ago
  You have convinced me quite thoroughly that you have not availed yourself much of what modern art has on offer. If I am right, it would behoove you to not speak so surely of that which you do not know or care to understand.
  - robertlagrant 4y ago
    You're not justifying your premise, so those two sentences are essentially free of content. Mind if I use them in my gallery's modern art exhibition?
    - enord 4y ago
      If you do not see how you are subverting the very argument that states your position, I don’t know what to tell you. If you do — touché; well played to you Sir!
      - 4y ago
showerst 4y ago
Art in the sense of gallery art is a social phenomenon. Nobody cares about the paint splashes with a meaningful interpretation on the placard from some high school student in Nebraska, but the same thing at a hip NYC gallery from the right NYU student with the right mentors could be a big break. This isn't a cheap shot on art (the same can be said for many things people enjoy, including much of fiction). It's to say that I think that this will replace "art as a low margin service" but not "the art world."
karaterobot 4y ago
This comment is right on the money in making the distinction between illustration/stock images, and fine art, let alone installation or performance art. It's a distinction not made often enough in these conversations. These functions are performed by different people, for different reasons, and they're used in different ways. Sadly, the market for the kind of art that the these models cannot disrupt is relatively small compared to the kind it can. There aren't a lot of people making a family-supporting living doing installation art. Most people I know with art degrees do illustration, photography, or are part of a video game or film asset production pipeline (or they draw tattoos, but that's a different matter). If I were them, I would be looking at the next generation of this technology as a potential threat to my livelihood. I don't want to be alarmist, but it is a possibility, and it'd be weird to dismiss it. One other thing I'll tack on here is that I find it fascinating that the kinds of skills required to be "good" at using these image generation models — "prompt engineering" if you like — are largely different than the ones required to create art from scratch. You can be a great studio painter, but not be able to "talk to" Stable Diffusion at all. Likewise, you may have zero artistic ability in the traditional sense, but be a prodigy at getting the computer to spit out what you are imagining, or something even better than that. If AI generated art is determined to be a kind of art (as I believe it will be) the parameters of what we call artistic ability may change.
- tsupiroti 4y ago
  > You can be a great studio painter, but not be able to "talk to" Stable Diffusion at all. Likewise, you may have zero artistic ability in the traditional sense, but be a prodigy at getting the computer to spit out what you are imagining, or something even better than that. I'm not so sure about this. Both require visualizing something upfront, evaluating the resulting images and understanding what needs to change. It's a bit like digital and analog photography. Digital makes the skills of getting a good exposure less relevant and allows post-processing. But a photographer still needs to know what makes a good photo. This doesn't invalidate the original point though. Making a living as a photographer became harder with the advent of digital photography.
- notahacker 4y ago
  > I find it fascinating that the kinds of skills required to be "good" at using these image generation models — "prompt engineering" if you like — are largely different than the ones required to create art from scratch. You can be a great studio painter, but not be able to "talk to" Stable Diffusion at all. Likewise, you may have zero artistic ability in the traditional sense, but be a prodigy at getting the computer to spit out what you are imagining, or something even better than that. But then, if you're a great studio painter, SD doesn't threaten your livelihood in any meaningful way, whereas if you're the sort of artist that produces video game assets, you've probably already got a keen eye for spotting rendering issues, and prompt engineering and inpainting and producing concept images AIs can work with are all likely to be skills you pick up considerably better than the average person... and then it's just another tool.
johndfsgdgdfg 4y ago
> I remember an example of an artist paying illegal immigrants to hold a wall (that could not stand by itself) in a gallery, to touch on social issues. Do you happen to have a link? This sounds amazing. I wish more artists and mainstream would come forward to help immigrants. The way the states treat the immigrants is inhumane. We should open our borders, not build more walls.
unity1001 4y ago
> In the modern art interpretation artists will not lose to SD. SD will enable them to do different things. Indeed. There was a time in the past ages in which one had to wait for a certain dye to arrive in your local merchant, take it and mix it with another dye in order to be able to paint a color that you need painted in your painting. They also waited and scoured for brushes and other supplies. Those tools and supplies becoming available widespread and easy did not reduce the quality of art. It made it easier to do art. Artists gained more time to express what they exactly had in mind rather than going through the mundanities of having to deal with tools and supplies. Computers have done the same. A lot of the art that can be done through computers these days, including the much-underappreciated art of creating virtual worlds and tales in computer games, would be dreams for the artists of earlier ages. AI won't be any different. The artists now will be able to say "Put a distant view of Shangri-La, half visible behind a misty mountain during sunset, as the traveler gazes at it and wonders when he will finally arrive there". And they will have it. Now, from this point on it gets interesting: Notice that how it was extremely easy for the artist to get a scene that conveys a particular emotion created. What was difficult now, and what was the final work of art in the earlier times, is now just a simple statement. Everything got much simpler. Meaning that, the artist will be able to convey more complex emotions and situations, creating more refined art. That's what happens when we give more tools to people and make a given level of doing anything simpler: People start building more advanced stuff, and the complexity moves to the newly emerging level. Like in software. Will be the same in art.
- zcw100 4y ago
  This reminds me of the early days of the synthesizer. Oh, no. Music is over. First it was novel and interesting, then it was poorly done and cliche and then the artists did what they do, they turned it into something new and fresh and then it was awesome. Same story, new tech. I'm just keeping my eye out for the Stevie Wonder of SD.
- davidivadavid 4y ago
  > The artists now will be able to say "Put a distant view of Shangri-La, half visible behind a misty mountain during sunset, as the traveler gazes at it and wonders when he will finally arrive there". And they will have it. Not so fast. To me this is the part that people are glossing over a bit too quickly in those discussions. How does the person making this know it's actually good art? How do they pick between the 40,000,000 variations of that composition they're capable of generating? Wouldn't they have to be familiar with principles of composition, color, dynamics, and so on? As it becomes easier to generate the art, it becomes more important to be capable of differentiating it (except for purely "industrial" production where "good enough" will do). And people will need to refine their taste to extreme levels to get there. It's the same with poetry. What's the AI worth if it's supposed to generate Shakespeare-level writing, but no one is capable of assessing its quality? Does it mean art essentially becomes a purely curation, taste-based endeavor? Just throwing some random questions out there.
moonchrome 4y ago
> art as illustration, or stock images (what SD puts in danger) I'd say the opposite. Seeing how shit SD was at generating placeholder products for a demo, and how it fails at stuff like proportions, depth, etc. the only good applications I've seen so far is abstract/concept art where you suspend disbelief because of the setting. I think abstract art is lower hanging fruit. "High art" will be impacted as long as someone spins it into a story, it mostly reduces into social circles and selling bullshit to eachother anyway.
pentagrama 4y ago
Is a good question how much AI will take the jobs of artists. To do a practical exercise, I just enter to The Atlantic website, which in my memory has some level of quality on custom illustrations and photos/collages to represent a concept of the stories. The Atlantic now is paying designers/illustrators and stock image websites to create this images. After the research, I believe that using AI will be useful in many cases and will reduce costs for sure. What do you think? ------ AI + Human "AI querier" AI is able to do this just from a text query and maybe a human tuning the query * https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2022/09/crypto-technology-government-regulation/671375/ https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2022/09/crypt... * https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2022/09/brad-delong-economist-slouching-towards-utopia-book/671337/ https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2022/09/brad-delon... * https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2022/09/free-speech-rushdie/671403/ https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2022/09/free-speec... * https://www.theatlantic.com/family/archive/2022/09/icebreaker-office-games-fun-facts/671411/ https://www.theatlantic.com/family/archive/2022/09/icebreake... ------- AI + Human "AI querier" + Human designer/artist for visual adjustments (merge/remove stuff/retouch) * https://www.theatlantic.com/newsletters/archive/2022/09/career-ambition-advice-data/671374/ https://www.theatlantic.com/newsletters/archive/2022/09/care... * https://www.theatlantic.com/family/archive/2022/09/developing-empathy-into-compassion/671368/ https://www.theatlantic.com/family/archive/2022/09/developin... -------- Not sure * https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2022/09/liberal-democrat-military-support-ukraine-trump/671328/ https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2022/09/liberal-de... * https://www.theatlantic.com/family/archive/2022/09/developing-empathy-into-compassion/671368/ https://www.theatlantic.com/family/archive/2022/09/developin...
vitaflo 4y ago
>I am not going to try to define art, but sometimes we refer to art as illustration, or stock images (what SD puts in danger) and some as broad modern art. A note here, the term "modern art" is usually used to define a period of art produced sometime between 1860-1960. When discussing artwork created today (or since about 1950), most would define that as "contemporary art".

rco8786 4y ago

Worth noting that this is also currently on the HN front page: https://waxy.org/2022/09/online-art-communities-begin-banning-ai-generated-images/ https://waxy.org/2022/09/online-art-communities-begin-bannin...

mejutoco 4y ago
Interesting one, thanks. By the nature of it that art community excludes huge areas of art (concept art, performance art, land art, …). Basically anything that is not a 2d image (sometimes animated) on a screen. To me it matches exactly what I meant with the first type of art, although I admit it is a crude categorisation. If they charged a small amount per submission probably the would stop users submitting 40 images per second.
ben_w 4y ago
Huh, was not expecting Fur Affinity to be a poster child for such a ban. The surprise is not because it’s furry — the art scene is such a large fraction of the furry economy that the introduction of AI art is approximately equivalent to introducing modern farming to, IDK, the 1850s or something — but rather because of that site’s lack of reputation with regards to technology. Although, perhaps that explains why the quotation is “That content generated can reference hundreds, even thousands of pieces of work from other artists to create derivative images.” rather than the billions in the training sets.
- Paracompact 4y ago
  This was actually predictable, if one was listening to the buzz around the different communities when the "this waifu/pony/fursona/etc. does not exist" generators were first introduced. Every community seemed to love the spectacle, except for the furry community, who were noticeably more on edge about it. I still don't really know what to attribute the attitude to, but it seems to be a pattern.
  - ben_w 4y ago
    As I said, the surprise is that particular website, not that specific fandom. The fandom is unsurprising for the reason I gave.
    - Paracompact 4y ago
      The pony and anime communities also revolve around an economy of mostly static 2d art, for what it's worth.

gizmo 4y ago

I think the sad reality is that modern art is largely trash. Perhaps because painting/drawing/sculpting with excellent technique is too much of a commodified trade already. Perhaps because it's too hard to be original. A new oil painting of a tree, no matter how well executed, won't draw people to an art gallery. So artists take refuge in social commentary: A banana taped to a wall. A naked person holding a trash barrel. Two bicycles welded together upside down. Or your example of undocumented people holding up a wall. But do these artists have anything insightful to say about inequality or exploitation? No. It's always trite, reductive, and utterly unoriginal. The truth is that "statement art" is, almost without exception, just bad art, but people wrongly believe that: (a) there must be a deeper meaning to it that they don't understand or (b) people who say art is bad are philistines. And if art is just supposed to make you think, even when the artist didn't have any deep thoughts themselves, then SD art can easily meet that benchmark. SD art will be good enough to decorate your home and office with. SD art will hold its own in art galleries, if it doesn't already. That's much broader than stock photography.

enord 4y ago
You have convinced me quite thoroughly that you have not availed yourself much of what modern art has on offer. If I am right, it would behoove you to not speak so surely of that which you do not know or care to understand.
- robertlagrant 4y ago
  You're not justifying your premise, so those two sentences are essentially free of content. Mind if I use them in my gallery's modern art exhibition?
  - enord 4y ago
    If you do not see how you are subverting the very argument that states your position, I don’t know what to tell you. If you do — touché; well played to you Sir!
    - 4y ago

showerst 4y ago

Art in the sense of gallery art is a social phenomenon. Nobody cares about the paint splashes with a meaningful interpretation on the placard from some high school student in Nebraska, but the same thing at a hip NYC gallery from the right NYU student with the right mentors could be a big break. This isn't a cheap shot on art (the same can be said for many things people enjoy, including much of fiction). It's to say that I think that this will replace "art as a low margin service" but not "the art world."

karaterobot 4y ago

This comment is right on the money in making the distinction between illustration/stock images, and fine art, let alone installation or performance art. It's a distinction not made often enough in these conversations. These functions are performed by different people, for different reasons, and they're used in different ways. Sadly, the market for the kind of art that the these models cannot disrupt is relatively small compared to the kind it can. There aren't a lot of people making a family-supporting living doing installation art. Most people I know with art degrees do illustration, photography, or are part of a video game or film asset production pipeline (or they draw tattoos, but that's a different matter). If I were them, I would be looking at the next generation of this technology as a potential threat to my livelihood. I don't want to be alarmist, but it is a possibility, and it'd be weird to dismiss it. One other thing I'll tack on here is that I find it fascinating that the kinds of skills required to be "good" at using these image generation models — "prompt engineering" if you like — are largely different than the ones required to create art from scratch. You can be a great studio painter, but not be able to "talk to" Stable Diffusion at all. Likewise, you may have zero artistic ability in the traditional sense, but be a prodigy at getting the computer to spit out what you are imagining, or something even better than that. If AI generated art is determined to be a kind of art (as I believe it will be) the parameters of what we call artistic ability may change.

tsupiroti 4y ago
> You can be a great studio painter, but not be able to "talk to" Stable Diffusion at all. Likewise, you may have zero artistic ability in the traditional sense, but be a prodigy at getting the computer to spit out what you are imagining, or something even better than that. I'm not so sure about this. Both require visualizing something upfront, evaluating the resulting images and understanding what needs to change. It's a bit like digital and analog photography. Digital makes the skills of getting a good exposure less relevant and allows post-processing. But a photographer still needs to know what makes a good photo. This doesn't invalidate the original point though. Making a living as a photographer became harder with the advent of digital photography.
notahacker 4y ago
> I find it fascinating that the kinds of skills required to be "good" at using these image generation models — "prompt engineering" if you like — are largely different than the ones required to create art from scratch. You can be a great studio painter, but not be able to "talk to" Stable Diffusion at all. Likewise, you may have zero artistic ability in the traditional sense, but be a prodigy at getting the computer to spit out what you are imagining, or something even better than that. But then, if you're a great studio painter, SD doesn't threaten your livelihood in any meaningful way, whereas if you're the sort of artist that produces video game assets, you've probably already got a keen eye for spotting rendering issues, and prompt engineering and inpainting and producing concept images AIs can work with are all likely to be skills you pick up considerably better than the average person... and then it's just another tool.

johndfsgdgdfg 4y ago

> I remember an example of an artist paying illegal immigrants to hold a wall (that could not stand by itself) in a gallery, to touch on social issues. Do you happen to have a link? This sounds amazing. I wish more artists and mainstream would come forward to help immigrants. The way the states treat the immigrants is inhumane. We should open our borders, not build more walls.

unity1001 4y ago

> In the modern art interpretation artists will not lose to SD. SD will enable them to do different things. Indeed. There was a time in the past ages in which one had to wait for a certain dye to arrive in your local merchant, take it and mix it with another dye in order to be able to paint a color that you need painted in your painting. They also waited and scoured for brushes and other supplies. Those tools and supplies becoming available widespread and easy did not reduce the quality of art. It made it easier to do art. Artists gained more time to express what they exactly had in mind rather than going through the mundanities of having to deal with tools and supplies. Computers have done the same. A lot of the art that can be done through computers these days, including the much-underappreciated art of creating virtual worlds and tales in computer games, would be dreams for the artists of earlier ages. AI won't be any different. The artists now will be able to say "Put a distant view of Shangri-La, half visible behind a misty mountain during sunset, as the traveler gazes at it and wonders when he will finally arrive there". And they will have it. Now, from this point on it gets interesting: Notice that how it was extremely easy for the artist to get a scene that conveys a particular emotion created. What was difficult now, and what was the final work of art in the earlier times, is now just a simple statement. Everything got much simpler. Meaning that, the artist will be able to convey more complex emotions and situations, creating more refined art. That's what happens when we give more tools to people and make a given level of doing anything simpler: People start building more advanced stuff, and the complexity moves to the newly emerging level. Like in software. Will be the same in art.

zcw100 4y ago
This reminds me of the early days of the synthesizer. Oh, no. Music is over. First it was novel and interesting, then it was poorly done and cliche and then the artists did what they do, they turned it into something new and fresh and then it was awesome. Same story, new tech. I'm just keeping my eye out for the Stevie Wonder of SD.
davidivadavid 4y ago
> The artists now will be able to say "Put a distant view of Shangri-La, half visible behind a misty mountain during sunset, as the traveler gazes at it and wonders when he will finally arrive there". And they will have it. Not so fast. To me this is the part that people are glossing over a bit too quickly in those discussions. How does the person making this know it's actually good art? How do they pick between the 40,000,000 variations of that composition they're capable of generating? Wouldn't they have to be familiar with principles of composition, color, dynamics, and so on? As it becomes easier to generate the art, it becomes more important to be capable of differentiating it (except for purely "industrial" production where "good enough" will do). And people will need to refine their taste to extreme levels to get there. It's the same with poetry. What's the AI worth if it's supposed to generate Shakespeare-level writing, but no one is capable of assessing its quality? Does it mean art essentially becomes a purely curation, taste-based endeavor? Just throwing some random questions out there.

moonchrome 4y ago

> art as illustration, or stock images (what SD puts in danger) I'd say the opposite. Seeing how shit SD was at generating placeholder products for a demo, and how it fails at stuff like proportions, depth, etc. the only good applications I've seen so far is abstract/concept art where you suspend disbelief because of the setting. I think abstract art is lower hanging fruit. "High art" will be impacted as long as someone spins it into a story, it mostly reduces into social circles and selling bullshit to eachother anyway.

pentagrama 4y ago

Is a good question how much AI will take the jobs of artists. To do a practical exercise, I just enter to The Atlantic website, which in my memory has some level of quality on custom illustrations and photos/collages to represent a concept of the stories. The Atlantic now is paying designers/illustrators and stock image websites to create this images. After the research, I believe that using AI will be useful in many cases and will reduce costs for sure. What do you think? ------ AI + Human "AI querier" AI is able to do this just from a text query and maybe a human tuning the query * https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2022/09/crypto-technology-government-regulation/671375/ https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2022/09/crypt... * https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2022/09/brad-delong-economist-slouching-towards-utopia-book/671337/ https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2022/09/brad-delon... * https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2022/09/free-speech-rushdie/671403/ https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2022/09/free-speec... * https://www.theatlantic.com/family/archive/2022/09/icebreaker-office-games-fun-facts/671411/ https://www.theatlantic.com/family/archive/2022/09/icebreake... ------- AI + Human "AI querier" + Human designer/artist for visual adjustments (merge/remove stuff/retouch) * https://www.theatlantic.com/newsletters/archive/2022/09/career-ambition-advice-data/671374/ https://www.theatlantic.com/newsletters/archive/2022/09/care... * https://www.theatlantic.com/family/archive/2022/09/developing-empathy-into-compassion/671368/ https://www.theatlantic.com/family/archive/2022/09/developin... -------- Not sure * https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2022/09/liberal-democrat-military-support-ukraine-trump/671328/ https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2022/09/liberal-de... * https://www.theatlantic.com/family/archive/2022/09/developing-empathy-into-compassion/671368/ https://www.theatlantic.com/family/archive/2022/09/developin...

vitaflo 4y ago

>I am not going to try to define art, but sometimes we refer to art as illustration, or stock images (what SD puts in danger) and some as broad modern art. A note here, the term "modern art" is usually used to define a period of art produced sometime between 1860-1960. When discussing artwork created today (or since about 1950), most would define that as "contemporary art".