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For artists who continue to paint, or use other physical means of expression through base materials and sell them as physical works, this entire AI art surge re

For artists who continue to paint, or use other physical means of expression through base materials and sell them as physical works, this entire AI art surge remains largely irrelevant in a practical sense. A buyer or patron who wants real, physical art will still need and want real, physical art, and I don't see an AI imitating much of that easily any time soon. The people or organizations to which AI-churned art appeals to most desire commercial visual churn. They are the same people who would in any case have least cared about art in its more creative, communicative forms. And there's nothing creative or imaginative about the results of machine-generated visuals. They're the very opposite in fact, visuals created literally mindlessly. If anything, I can see AI art giving a new breath of life and interest to real man-made art, much like industrial food production gave organic "local-grown" food producers a chance to brand themselves with a distinct, desirable identity.

pavel_lishin 4y ago
I don't know if I agree. One of the big sources of income for online artists is commissions of D&D characters and such; AI-generated art is now getting good enough that people can get a "good-enough" version of what they want for free, instead of paying an artist $50 or $100 for a piece of art. I've commissioned art for my D&D character before, and I'll almost certainly do so again - but if I'm playing a one-shot online and want a quick image to share with the group, AI-generated art is a fast and free way of getting that!
- bheadmaster 4y ago
  People have been losing their jobs because of technology ever since the industrial revolution, each one of them enraged about it, and rightfully so. Society doesn't care about people who've put their whole lives into a skill that suddenly became worthless (or much less valuable then it was). The solution is not to ban technology (you can't really ban technology, as it's not under total government control) - the solution is to enable anyone to pursue new skills without fear of homelessness and starvation. I.e. Universal Basic Income.
  - kaibee 4y ago
    > the solution is to enable anyone to pursue new skills without fear of homelessness and starvation. I.e. Universal Basic Income. Sure but good luck getting that to happen. The same level automation has already happened for agriculture and I still have to buy my groceries.
  - odessacubbage 4y ago
    i mean what is even the point of pursuing a new skill if you can't create things anymore because the act of creation and craftsmanship have been so thoroughly devalued in favor of cheap volume? what kind of fucking joyless bugworld is that?
    - frumper 4y ago
      Plenty of craftsman have good careers. We have a cabinet maker in town that is busy charging double the other cabinet makers. Those other cabinet makers charge double what a crew will install from Home Depot. All of them are busy.
- helloworld11 4y ago
  >The people or organizations to which AI-churned art appeals to most desire commercial visual churn. They are the same people who would in any case have least cared about art in its more creative, communicative forms. I specifically addressed this in my original post. You're exactly the kind of person who would possibly like this AI technology, and apparently not someone who would have an appreciation for art in its artistic, emotionally appealing form. Your disagreement is based on a misunderstanding of definitions.
HKH2 4y ago
> For artists who continue to paint, or use other physical means of expression through base materials and sell them as physical works, this entire AI art surge remains largely irrelevant in a practical sense. A buyer or patron who wants real, physical art will still need and want real, physical art, and I don't see an AI imitating much of that easily any time soon. I don't think it would be that hard to get a machine to physically paint in layers. Sure, the velocity, pressure, texture etc. of a brush would take time to model, but you could start with spray paint.
- a_shovel 4y ago
  Importantly, a physical painting machine isn't gonna be something anyone with a beefy GPU can download for free. It would pretty much only be useful for factories in Mexico making "Henry Rogers"-style mass-produced paintings [0], which would be bad news for the impoverished workers currently making them, but not for most other painters. [0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rOjTc3F5UB4 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rOjTc3F5UB4
  - HKH2 4y ago
    Yeah maybe the demand for visual art just isn't there. I imagine a plotter with a brush which has paint injected directly into it, which I don't think would cost that much materials-wise.
dqpb 4y ago
Dall-e can create beautiful images of oil paintings that can be printed to canvas, much like original oil paintings are printed to canvas.
- gedy 4y ago
  Yes, I've been doing just this, then brushing over the canvas print with thick varnish, it's quite convincing.
  - tern 4y ago
    And then what is the story behind the work? Well: an artist made someone with DALL-E, printed it, and then printed over it to make it convincing. Now, compare with: "this is an original master work of a historically revered artist," just to take _an_ example. Alternatively, "my friend made this by painstakingly carving into a 200 year old block of hardwood taken from the Black Forest after the death of their father." Certainly you can fool people, but what's the point of that? Not to nock it, but things are what they are. Art is received as the entire experience of the object. Often a simple print is the right thing for the context, but that's not what OP is getting at.
    - cercatrova 4y ago
      The point is it looks nice enough for gedy to hang up on the walls. I presume they don't care about fooling anyone, and likely would readily tell those who ask that it's an AI image. Sometimes people value the aesthetic over the provenance or story behind a piece of art.
      - gedy 4y ago
        Yes precisely. E.g. I enjoy Gustav Klimt paintings and thought it would be interesting if he had painted in Asia, and DALL-E helps makes that idea impressively "real": https://i.postimg.cc/nL2fMWPb/EB46-BE10-929-B-4358-BBCA-60-FC9-C286890.jpg https://i.postimg.cc/nL2fMWPb/EB46-BE10-929-B-4358-BBCA-60-F...
helloworld11 4y ago
All of you commenting seem to miss the fundamental point that I made: People who appreciate art for art's human aspects will want HUMAN, emotionally derived art, not a printable piece of AI-generated pixel-vomit that can then be mounted and varnished. I have nothing against anyone doing this and I absolutely don't support banning any technology that lets people explore new frontiers of creativity, but I don't see even AI-connected devices that can physically paint things replacing artists as imaginative human creators of concepts and emotional ideas expressed for other humans. To go on about how an AI could eventually paint or sculpt and so forth from its own algorithms is to miss the point entirely about this specific type of creation and the extremely old human desire to enjoy it. Perhaps to be expected from a site so frequented by many people who spend their working lives "optimizing" X or Y gimmick for major tech giants and viewing other humans largely as simple parts of a data gathering landscape.
JacobThreeThree 4y ago
>For artists who continue to paint, or use other physical means of expression through base materials and sell them as physical works, this entire AI art surge remains largely irrelevant in a practical sense. A buyer or patron who wants real, physical art will still need and want real, physical art, and I don't see an AI imitating much of that easily any time soon. Giclée prints on canvas are already very popular with artists. Printing into physical medium is already trivial whether the art is produced by human or AI. See as an example the Epson SureColor S80600 Printer: https://epson.ca/For-Work/Printers/Large-Format/Epson-SureColor-S80600-Printer/p/SCS80600PE https://epson.ca/For-Work/Printers/Large-Format/Epson-SureCo... https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TECjOmrlogg https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TECjOmrlogg
- tern 4y ago
  For artists at high levels who print, the print is a part of the work and is often done with close to as much care as one puts into a painting—fine tuning colors, making small details perfect, printing on exotic materials, totally messing up the print in certain ways, painting over it, layering the print with other things, printing on fabric and hanging, stretching, modifying, or destroying the fabric etc etc. Every aspect of making things available to humans becomes a medium, from writing code to literally just cleaning something to factory production to using "art materials." Indeed a lot of mid-tier / long-tail work is also just straight up prints from the print shop, but OP is talking about the bespoke side of the spectrum. At the high end, fine art defines "bespoke." https://www.contemporaryartdaily.com/ https://www.contemporaryartdaily.com/

pavel_lishin 4y ago

I don't know if I agree. One of the big sources of income for online artists is commissions of D&D characters and such; AI-generated art is now getting good enough that people can get a "good-enough" version of what they want for free, instead of paying an artist $50 or $100 for a piece of art. I've commissioned art for my D&D character before, and I'll almost certainly do so again - but if I'm playing a one-shot online and want a quick image to share with the group, AI-generated art is a fast and free way of getting that!

bheadmaster 4y ago
People have been losing their jobs because of technology ever since the industrial revolution, each one of them enraged about it, and rightfully so. Society doesn't care about people who've put their whole lives into a skill that suddenly became worthless (or much less valuable then it was). The solution is not to ban technology (you can't really ban technology, as it's not under total government control) - the solution is to enable anyone to pursue new skills without fear of homelessness and starvation. I.e. Universal Basic Income.
- kaibee 4y ago
  > the solution is to enable anyone to pursue new skills without fear of homelessness and starvation. I.e. Universal Basic Income. Sure but good luck getting that to happen. The same level automation has already happened for agriculture and I still have to buy my groceries.
- odessacubbage 4y ago
  i mean what is even the point of pursuing a new skill if you can't create things anymore because the act of creation and craftsmanship have been so thoroughly devalued in favor of cheap volume? what kind of fucking joyless bugworld is that?
  - frumper 4y ago
    Plenty of craftsman have good careers. We have a cabinet maker in town that is busy charging double the other cabinet makers. Those other cabinet makers charge double what a crew will install from Home Depot. All of them are busy.
helloworld11 4y ago
>The people or organizations to which AI-churned art appeals to most desire commercial visual churn. They are the same people who would in any case have least cared about art in its more creative, communicative forms. I specifically addressed this in my original post. You're exactly the kind of person who would possibly like this AI technology, and apparently not someone who would have an appreciation for art in its artistic, emotionally appealing form. Your disagreement is based on a misunderstanding of definitions.

HKH2 4y ago

a_shovel 4y ago
Importantly, a physical painting machine isn't gonna be something anyone with a beefy GPU can download for free. It would pretty much only be useful for factories in Mexico making "Henry Rogers"-style mass-produced paintings [0], which would be bad news for the impoverished workers currently making them, but not for most other painters. [0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rOjTc3F5UB4 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rOjTc3F5UB4
- HKH2 4y ago
  Yeah maybe the demand for visual art just isn't there. I imagine a plotter with a brush which has paint injected directly into it, which I don't think would cost that much materials-wise.

dqpb 4y ago

Dall-e can create beautiful images of oil paintings that can be printed to canvas, much like original oil paintings are printed to canvas.

gedy 4y ago
Yes, I've been doing just this, then brushing over the canvas print with thick varnish, it's quite convincing.
- tern 4y ago
  And then what is the story behind the work? Well: an artist made someone with DALL-E, printed it, and then printed over it to make it convincing. Now, compare with: "this is an original master work of a historically revered artist," just to take _an_ example. Alternatively, "my friend made this by painstakingly carving into a 200 year old block of hardwood taken from the Black Forest after the death of their father." Certainly you can fool people, but what's the point of that? Not to nock it, but things are what they are. Art is received as the entire experience of the object. Often a simple print is the right thing for the context, but that's not what OP is getting at.
  - cercatrova 4y ago
    The point is it looks nice enough for gedy to hang up on the walls. I presume they don't care about fooling anyone, and likely would readily tell those who ask that it's an AI image. Sometimes people value the aesthetic over the provenance or story behind a piece of art.
    - gedy 4y ago
      Yes precisely. E.g. I enjoy Gustav Klimt paintings and thought it would be interesting if he had painted in Asia, and DALL-E helps makes that idea impressively "real": https://i.postimg.cc/nL2fMWPb/EB46-BE10-929-B-4358-BBCA-60-FC9-C286890.jpg https://i.postimg.cc/nL2fMWPb/EB46-BE10-929-B-4358-BBCA-60-F...

helloworld11 4y ago

All of you commenting seem to miss the fundamental point that I made: People who appreciate art for art's human aspects will want HUMAN, emotionally derived art, not a printable piece of AI-generated pixel-vomit that can then be mounted and varnished. I have nothing against anyone doing this and I absolutely don't support banning any technology that lets people explore new frontiers of creativity, but I don't see even AI-connected devices that can physically paint things replacing artists as imaginative human creators of concepts and emotional ideas expressed for other humans. To go on about how an AI could eventually paint or sculpt and so forth from its own algorithms is to miss the point entirely about this specific type of creation and the extremely old human desire to enjoy it. Perhaps to be expected from a site so frequented by many people who spend their working lives "optimizing" X or Y gimmick for major tech giants and viewing other humans largely as simple parts of a data gathering landscape.

JacobThreeThree 4y ago

>For artists who continue to paint, or use other physical means of expression through base materials and sell them as physical works, this entire AI art surge remains largely irrelevant in a practical sense. A buyer or patron who wants real, physical art will still need and want real, physical art, and I don't see an AI imitating much of that easily any time soon. Giclée prints on canvas are already very popular with artists. Printing into physical medium is already trivial whether the art is produced by human or AI. See as an example the Epson SureColor S80600 Printer: https://epson.ca/For-Work/Printers/Large-Format/Epson-SureColor-S80600-Printer/p/SCS80600PE https://epson.ca/For-Work/Printers/Large-Format/Epson-SureCo... https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TECjOmrlogg https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TECjOmrlogg

tern 4y ago
For artists at high levels who print, the print is a part of the work and is often done with close to as much care as one puts into a painting—fine tuning colors, making small details perfect, printing on exotic materials, totally messing up the print in certain ways, painting over it, layering the print with other things, printing on fabric and hanging, stretching, modifying, or destroying the fabric etc etc. Every aspect of making things available to humans becomes a medium, from writing code to literally just cleaning something to factory production to using "art materials." Indeed a lot of mid-tier / long-tail work is also just straight up prints from the print shop, but OP is talking about the bespoke side of the spectrum. At the high end, fine art defines "bespoke." https://www.contemporaryartdaily.com/ https://www.contemporaryartdaily.com/