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>I’m convinced AI art is going to be a boon for artists. Have you talked to any artists? Because in my experience they universally hate AI generated art. Not j

>I’m convinced AI art is going to be a boon for artists. Have you talked to any artists? Because in my experience they universally hate AI generated art. Not just a little. I think I've seen more artists who were open to NFT's at this point than AI. Art sharing websites are getting filled to the brim with posts from new accounts sharing AI art which sometimes very directly takes clearly identifiable features and styles from other artists. AI generated art is beckoning a possible dark age for visual arts. There are many lost arts already, if AI trivializes the costs and efforts why bother honing it. Then we find ourselves in a creative void as the only art generated will be based on art that of which has come before.

hodgesrm 4y ago
Have you looked at the resulting art works? There's an exhibit called "Unsupervised" currently running at the New York Museum of Modern Art [0]. I saw it last week--a fascinating of collage of shifting, waterlike images with delightful trompe l'oeil effects. If this is what AI-generated art can look like I'm all for it. [0] https://www.moma.org/calendar/exhibitions/5535 https://www.moma.org/calendar/exhibitions/5535
- JKCalhoun 4y ago
  Waiting to read about the artist that displayed their work — pretending that it is the work of AI, ha ha.
lolinder 4y ago
> There are many lost arts already, if AI trivializes the costs and efforts why bother honing it. Photography can capture reality far better than any artist could achieve even with a lifetime of practice, and today it can do so with nearly zero cost--take out your phone, hold down the camera button, snap a picture. These advances hardly put an end to drawing and painting as skills. It turned out that there's value in art beyond verisimilitude, and if anything the advent of photography encouraged a resurgence of exploration into what art really is: a movement away from pure verisimilitude in search of feeling. This is what I expect to happen with AI art today. Yes, the AI models can produce art that looks awesome and wonderful now, but it's frankly already starting to wear thin. Art exists to fulfill humanity's need to experience something new, and AI alone simply cannot keep up with the meta game. There will need to be human artists guiding the AI to produce something valuable, and there will continue to be human artists working by hand to create the novel works that the AI could never have rendered.
- tartoran 4y ago
  > There will need to be human artists guiding the AI to produce something valuable, and there will continue to be human artists working by hand to create the novel works that the AI could never have rendered. Yes but who’d want their art to be fee back in trainig the AI to achieve what they have done with a click of the button? > This is what I expect to happen with AI art today. Yes, the AI models can produce art that looks awesome and wonderful now, but it's frankly already starting to wear thin. Art exists to fulfill humanity's need to experience something new, and AI alone simply cannot keep up with the meta game. But the essence of artwork can actually be copied away too and in the process squander the artists livelyhood. Yes, the argument that the artist can themselves take advantage of that and that is true for some computer literate artists but what about the others? Does the future of art necessarily have to tie art to computers and AI?
  - lolinder 4y ago
    > But the essence of artwork can actually be copied away too and in the process squander the artists livelyhood. No, because the essence of art is meaning, and AI cannot deliver that without a human agency behind it. AI will do to art what technology does to every field: it will eliminate the need for shovelware-style jobs, leaving only the truly creative jobs behind. It will most likely resemble what happened to web developers when SquareSpace and WordPress became good enough for untrained people to pick up and build with. If all you knew how to do was write enough HTML and CSS to make a website that looked "good enough", your job was in danger. But if you were a good designer or a good engineer, you transitioned to a more specialized role, working for the many orgs who needed something beyond the capabilities of the tech. I expect the same will happen in art. To use book covers as an example: the job of illustrating covers for cheap romance novels will certainly be replaced, because they all look the same already. But publishers will still need humans (either driving the AI or painting by hand) for the books they hope will be best sellers, because it takes a real artist to know how to capture the spirit of a book in a cover image.
    - onepointsixC 4y ago
      >No, because the essence of art is meaning, and AI cannot deliver that without a human agency behind it. I see no reason why another AI eventually couldn't come up with prompts from human interests found from algorithms. There's exactly no reason a human needs to be involved at all.
KMnO4 4y ago
I am an (amateur, non professional) artist and I am a big supporter of AI generated art tools. The main issue is that anyone can write a simple prompt and get 85% of the way to an image that previously required a decade of experience to create. But that last 15% is where real artists differentiate themselves. It’s the last 15% that can’t be faked if you don’t have a sense of artistic direction and discretion. I strongly disagree with “why bother honing it” as well. If anything, being able to get to the “honing” stage so quickly is what makes these tools so powerful. I’m sure if Gordon Ramsey had to butcher his own chicken, grind his own grain for flour, and churn his cream into butter, he wouldn’t spend as much time on the finishing and plating of a chicken sandwich.
janalsncm 4y ago
Disclaimer, I’m a layperson when it comes to art. I’ve taken one art history class so I could probably talk about various art styles, but I’m no expert. In my experience of visiting art museums, some of the classical and renaissance art is incredible. There is clearly some profound idea behind the piece, and the skill is the vehicle of that idea. A huge amount of art, though, is simply commissioned portraits of some wealthy businessman or forgettable Duke. The purpose of these paintings is simply to represent reality. There is no idea behind it. For the artists painting them, the camera must have been devastating. It meant that years of training in studying how to properly draw an eye and how to get the colors inside a shadow right were at risk of being entirely devalued. But the camera also laid bare the fact that art is more than just skill. I imagine a lot of artists who were coasting by on skill alone hated the camera. We’re at that point now with digital art. The cost of skill in actually drawing a thing is now zero. Anyone can do it. The question is, do they have anything to say?
- visarga 4y ago
  > The cost of skill in actually drawing a thing is now zero. Anyone can do it. The question is, do they have anything to say? Excellent point. It's up to us to level up to the opportunity.
- Riverheart 4y ago
  Everyone has something to say and most of it is noise just like those portraits except now the gallery is going to be 1000 to 1 useless portraits to meaningful art. What is good will be lost in a sea of mundane as everyone tries for the spotlight.
thomashop 4y ago
I have talked to and worked with a few artists, trying to capture their style using generative AI models. With the limited subset of artists I have worked with (traditional modern / contemporary painters) they have been very inspired by the creative possibilites of these models and in one case see it as a great opportunity to scale their work to new types of media such as video. It would have been practically impossible for one of the artists I am working with to draw each frame by hand but now she can generate music videos in her style by tweaking and working with Stable Diffusion and a set of reference images.
LoveMortuus 4y ago
>AI generated art is beckoning a possible dark age for visual arts. I don't think the invention of a camera displaced many artists, but I'm quite sure that they were just as angry, probably saying how it doesn't have a soul and such. But in the end it improved the life of humans to an unimaginable levels. I think same if not more can be or will be achieved with AI generated art. And I don't think it's displace many artists jobs. Again, the coming of AI art feels like the coming of camera must have felt.
- Fricken 4y ago
  More specifically, the invention of print processes suitable for reproducing photographs displaced a huge number of artists. If you go looking through glossy magazines of the 1940s, they were packed with illustrations.
- onepointsixC 4y ago
  The invention of the Camera was drastically different. Realistic portraits and actual photographs are just not the same thing and have their own respective places. AI threatens to make artists obsolete by via the direct usage and synthesis of their work along with the work of their peers. Used without their permission.
ilkke 4y ago
Professional artist here, and I can tell you there are as many different opinions as there are people, including those who couldn't care less. But if you look at the hot take mic drop platforms, you will of course see either hype or outrage with little nuance. It's happening very quickly and the outcomes are difficult to predict, but it's clear it's a big deal. We either fear the unknown or are excited by it. I feel most of the controversy is in fact the robots-will-make-our-life-comfortable / robots-will-take-our-jobs discussion. The real problem is elsewhere, not the tech itself. Photography is if course a good comparison, but don't forget 3d CGI. I can place things exactly how I want them and have the computer do ALL the drawing for me? Outrageous! It certainly removed a lot of need for menial manual work (and even filming), but has also opened the opportunity for creating entirely new things that before would just not be practical, or enjoyable to make. And there's no doubt now that a lot of skill is required to make things look good. It can seem like it's easy to get great looking stuff with AI but it's not. What's easy is to churn out tons of samey derivative crap that will age very badly as soon as we get used to it, like with early 3d.
- tartoran 4y ago
  >don't forget 3d CGI Yes, good point but let’s look at what a a boring mess CGI movies have become. Movie productions used to employ a lot of artists and looking back you actually can tell. For example the 1982 movie ‘The Thing’. All those effects in the movie are realistic, are not CGI and have become now a lost art.
- Riverheart 4y ago
  CGI didn't crowdsource 3D models from other artists to dynamically build scenes with no technical effort and offer it to the masses for free. Doesn't seem comparable.

hodgesrm 4y ago

Have you looked at the resulting art works? There's an exhibit called "Unsupervised" currently running at the New York Museum of Modern Art [0]. I saw it last week--a fascinating of collage of shifting, waterlike images with delightful trompe l'oeil effects. If this is what AI-generated art can look like I'm all for it. [0] https://www.moma.org/calendar/exhibitions/5535 https://www.moma.org/calendar/exhibitions/5535

JKCalhoun 4y ago
Waiting to read about the artist that displayed their work — pretending that it is the work of AI, ha ha.

lolinder 4y ago

> There are many lost arts already, if AI trivializes the costs and efforts why bother honing it. Photography can capture reality far better than any artist could achieve even with a lifetime of practice, and today it can do so with nearly zero cost--take out your phone, hold down the camera button, snap a picture. These advances hardly put an end to drawing and painting as skills. It turned out that there's value in art beyond verisimilitude, and if anything the advent of photography encouraged a resurgence of exploration into what art really is: a movement away from pure verisimilitude in search of feeling. This is what I expect to happen with AI art today. Yes, the AI models can produce art that looks awesome and wonderful now, but it's frankly already starting to wear thin. Art exists to fulfill humanity's need to experience something new, and AI alone simply cannot keep up with the meta game. There will need to be human artists guiding the AI to produce something valuable, and there will continue to be human artists working by hand to create the novel works that the AI could never have rendered.

tartoran 4y ago
> There will need to be human artists guiding the AI to produce something valuable, and there will continue to be human artists working by hand to create the novel works that the AI could never have rendered. Yes but who’d want their art to be fee back in trainig the AI to achieve what they have done with a click of the button? > This is what I expect to happen with AI art today. Yes, the AI models can produce art that looks awesome and wonderful now, but it's frankly already starting to wear thin. Art exists to fulfill humanity's need to experience something new, and AI alone simply cannot keep up with the meta game. But the essence of artwork can actually be copied away too and in the process squander the artists livelyhood. Yes, the argument that the artist can themselves take advantage of that and that is true for some computer literate artists but what about the others? Does the future of art necessarily have to tie art to computers and AI?
- lolinder 4y ago
  > But the essence of artwork can actually be copied away too and in the process squander the artists livelyhood. No, because the essence of art is meaning, and AI cannot deliver that without a human agency behind it. AI will do to art what technology does to every field: it will eliminate the need for shovelware-style jobs, leaving only the truly creative jobs behind. It will most likely resemble what happened to web developers when SquareSpace and WordPress became good enough for untrained people to pick up and build with. If all you knew how to do was write enough HTML and CSS to make a website that looked "good enough", your job was in danger. But if you were a good designer or a good engineer, you transitioned to a more specialized role, working for the many orgs who needed something beyond the capabilities of the tech. I expect the same will happen in art. To use book covers as an example: the job of illustrating covers for cheap romance novels will certainly be replaced, because they all look the same already. But publishers will still need humans (either driving the AI or painting by hand) for the books they hope will be best sellers, because it takes a real artist to know how to capture the spirit of a book in a cover image.
  - onepointsixC 4y ago
    >No, because the essence of art is meaning, and AI cannot deliver that without a human agency behind it. I see no reason why another AI eventually couldn't come up with prompts from human interests found from algorithms. There's exactly no reason a human needs to be involved at all.

KMnO4 4y ago

I am an (amateur, non professional) artist and I am a big supporter of AI generated art tools. The main issue is that anyone can write a simple prompt and get 85% of the way to an image that previously required a decade of experience to create. But that last 15% is where real artists differentiate themselves. It’s the last 15% that can’t be faked if you don’t have a sense of artistic direction and discretion. I strongly disagree with “why bother honing it” as well. If anything, being able to get to the “honing” stage so quickly is what makes these tools so powerful. I’m sure if Gordon Ramsey had to butcher his own chicken, grind his own grain for flour, and churn his cream into butter, he wouldn’t spend as much time on the finishing and plating of a chicken sandwich.

janalsncm 4y ago

Disclaimer, I’m a layperson when it comes to art. I’ve taken one art history class so I could probably talk about various art styles, but I’m no expert. In my experience of visiting art museums, some of the classical and renaissance art is incredible. There is clearly some profound idea behind the piece, and the skill is the vehicle of that idea. A huge amount of art, though, is simply commissioned portraits of some wealthy businessman or forgettable Duke. The purpose of these paintings is simply to represent reality. There is no idea behind it. For the artists painting them, the camera must have been devastating. It meant that years of training in studying how to properly draw an eye and how to get the colors inside a shadow right were at risk of being entirely devalued. But the camera also laid bare the fact that art is more than just skill. I imagine a lot of artists who were coasting by on skill alone hated the camera. We’re at that point now with digital art. The cost of skill in actually drawing a thing is now zero. Anyone can do it. The question is, do they have anything to say?

visarga 4y ago
> The cost of skill in actually drawing a thing is now zero. Anyone can do it. The question is, do they have anything to say? Excellent point. It's up to us to level up to the opportunity.
Riverheart 4y ago
Everyone has something to say and most of it is noise just like those portraits except now the gallery is going to be 1000 to 1 useless portraits to meaningful art. What is good will be lost in a sea of mundane as everyone tries for the spotlight.

thomashop 4y ago

I have talked to and worked with a few artists, trying to capture their style using generative AI models. With the limited subset of artists I have worked with (traditional modern / contemporary painters) they have been very inspired by the creative possibilites of these models and in one case see it as a great opportunity to scale their work to new types of media such as video. It would have been practically impossible for one of the artists I am working with to draw each frame by hand but now she can generate music videos in her style by tweaking and working with Stable Diffusion and a set of reference images.

LoveMortuus 4y ago

>AI generated art is beckoning a possible dark age for visual arts. I don't think the invention of a camera displaced many artists, but I'm quite sure that they were just as angry, probably saying how it doesn't have a soul and such. But in the end it improved the life of humans to an unimaginable levels. I think same if not more can be or will be achieved with AI generated art. And I don't think it's displace many artists jobs. Again, the coming of AI art feels like the coming of camera must have felt.

Fricken 4y ago
More specifically, the invention of print processes suitable for reproducing photographs displaced a huge number of artists. If you go looking through glossy magazines of the 1940s, they were packed with illustrations.
onepointsixC 4y ago
The invention of the Camera was drastically different. Realistic portraits and actual photographs are just not the same thing and have their own respective places. AI threatens to make artists obsolete by via the direct usage and synthesis of their work along with the work of their peers. Used without their permission.

ilkke 4y ago

Professional artist here, and I can tell you there are as many different opinions as there are people, including those who couldn't care less. But if you look at the hot take mic drop platforms, you will of course see either hype or outrage with little nuance. It's happening very quickly and the outcomes are difficult to predict, but it's clear it's a big deal. We either fear the unknown or are excited by it. I feel most of the controversy is in fact the robots-will-make-our-life-comfortable / robots-will-take-our-jobs discussion. The real problem is elsewhere, not the tech itself. Photography is if course a good comparison, but don't forget 3d CGI. I can place things exactly how I want them and have the computer do ALL the drawing for me? Outrageous! It certainly removed a lot of need for menial manual work (and even filming), but has also opened the opportunity for creating entirely new things that before would just not be practical, or enjoyable to make. And there's no doubt now that a lot of skill is required to make things look good. It can seem like it's easy to get great looking stuff with AI but it's not. What's easy is to churn out tons of samey derivative crap that will age very badly as soon as we get used to it, like with early 3d.

tartoran 4y ago
>don't forget 3d CGI Yes, good point but let’s look at what a a boring mess CGI movies have become. Movie productions used to employ a lot of artists and looking back you actually can tell. For example the 1982 movie ‘The Thing’. All those effects in the movie are realistic, are not CGI and have become now a lost art.
Riverheart 4y ago
CGI didn't crowdsource 3D models from other artists to dynamically build scenes with no technical effort and offer it to the masses for free. Doesn't seem comparable.