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I'm curious if there was a similar rebellion among traditional-medium artists when digital art started becoming widespread a couple decades ago. Was there simil

by causi 4y ago

I'm curious if there was a similar rebellion among traditional-medium artists when digital art started becoming widespread a couple decades ago. Was there similar hand-wringing over how being able to use layers was cheating, how a smoothing filter or a clone tool made you "not a real artist"?

tudorw 4y ago
yes
- tudorw 4y ago
  it was probably the same for whoever came up with perspective, 'oh yes, well, I see what you've done, isn't that, erm, cheating, and anyway, my painting looks more like a real painting...etc etc'
Karawebnetwork 4y ago
It was, yes. Part of it was calling digital artists lazy and a lot of it was the fear that galleries would cease to exist because everyone would just look at free art online and art itself would die. Of course, it wasn't everyone, but the sentiment was there.
oneeyedpigeon 4y ago
I'm curious about where 'real artists' would draw the line. Would it be cheating to use a paintbrush unless you've crafted it yourself? I also find it ironic that some of the biggest detractors of AI art are, themselves, exclusively digital artists.
- caconym_ 4y ago
  Personally I would draw the line where the tools I'm ultimately relying on to create art don't function at all without having millions of works by other artists baked into them. You can say that's how my brain is doing it anyway—and sure, you might be right to a first approximation—but isn't that the whole point? If I'm not even capable of executing that synthesis in some medium X myself, but rather have to outsource it to a computer program, then I'm more technician than artist. It's something I don't expect people who have never seriously engaged with an artistic process to understand. Art is interesting when the artist discovered things in creating it, and you are not going to discover much by typing in a few sentences of prompt and maybe touching up the image (or story, or whatever) the model makes for you. "Cheating" is a loaded and generally unsuitable word based on an infantile understanding of why art matters. The universe doesn't give a shit whether you do it yourself or get a machine to do it for you, and neither do I, really. Modulo speculative impacts on economy and culture, these are obviously useful tools and I don't have any moral issue with people using them. But I will say that if those people are aiming to create art rather than engage in a process of design, then by using these tools in their primary creative workflows they are depriving themselves of a priceless journey. That's why it matters. It's a bit like sitting in your car at a trailhead and flying a drone out to the end of the trail and back rather than doing the walking yourself. Not only are you potentially ruining the experience for others (see: the recent Clarke's World closure to submissions), you're vastly cheapening it for yourself too. Most people in today's discourse are focusing on the former, but I think the latter is more interesting and important.
  - YeGoblynQueenne 4y ago
    Great point, but then, I went for an art degree before I turned to computer science, so I know exactly what you mean. The act of artistic creation itself is rewarding, in a way very different to looking at art created by someone else. As a counterpoint, though, I note that I've done some work on language generation and that, too, is something that can engage the user, and can be almost as rewarding as e.g. writing a story. Though that's much more so if the language generator is your own piece of work. I'll also add that we appreciate artists who develop their own, unique personal style much more than artists who copy those of others. So far, neural net image generators have not been shown capable of creating their own styles, unless of course one considers artifacts of their generation process (e.g. monster hands) as a "style". People severely overestimate the "creativity" of such systems.
    - caconym_ 4y ago
      > As a counterpoint, though, I note that I've done some work on language generation and that, too, is something that can engage the user, and can be almost as rewarding as e.g. writing a story. Though that's much more so if the language generator is your own piece of work. Writing fiction is my thing, and I've seriously considered using AI to generate descriptive passages and other relative "filler" as a force multiplier. Either way, I'd be interested to see how well I could get a model to imitate my style. I think I'm waiting until it's easy to run a GPT-3-class thing locally, which IIUC isn't currently the case. I don't like building workflows that rely on "cloud" stuff. "Force multiplier" is the key, though. Another example might be somebody writing a story and then using AI to generate illustrations for it. I can also imagine future image generation AI allowing much finer control over the results, which would (IMO) make it much more akin to photography (and legitimize some of those arguments that have been popping up everywhere, including in this thread). Letting the computer provide the vision and direction as well as the technique is fun, for sure. I had a lot of fun with Stable Diffusion. But it's as you say—the current state of the art is highly imitative, and I think these capabilities will ultimately frustrate serious creators of art and serious consumers of it.
luma 4y ago
It absolutely happened with the advent of photography that was certain to destroy the lives of hard working painters. Those painters at the time were mostly employed to paint pictures of rich people and something that could "easily" perform the same task to create images of mere commoners was a clear sign of impending doom. What happened instead is, free of the requirement to appease rich people, what we now call "modern art" was created.
- causi 4y ago
  That's an excellent point. There are many parallels between criticisms of AI art that call it "just typing in a prompt" and calling photography "just aiming a camera". Does the fact that anybody can point their phone and create an image subtract from the "art-ness" of a professional photographer?
  - luma 4y ago
    Many people in the art world at the time argued exactly that, just like they are doing today. From the photographers side it took lobbying, an act of congress, and a supreme court decision to finally grant copyright protection to photographs.
- throwaway4aday 4y ago
  > free of the requirement to appease rich people I don't believe this is the case now and it probably hasn't been for a long time, at least since the popularity of modern art exploded. Maybe it was true when the genre was still underground or generally reviled?
  - causi 4y ago
    You know he's talking about the invention and proliferation of photography, right? AKA two hundred years ago.
  - luma 4y ago
    Check your timelines: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_photography https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_photography https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Modern_art https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Modern_art The thing you are implying is explicitly what I am claiming in the post.

by causi 4y ago

tudorw 4y ago

yes

tudorw 4y ago
it was probably the same for whoever came up with perspective, 'oh yes, well, I see what you've done, isn't that, erm, cheating, and anyway, my painting looks more like a real painting...etc etc'

Karawebnetwork 4y ago

It was, yes. Part of it was calling digital artists lazy and a lot of it was the fear that galleries would cease to exist because everyone would just look at free art online and art itself would die. Of course, it wasn't everyone, but the sentiment was there.

oneeyedpigeon 4y ago

I'm curious about where 'real artists' would draw the line. Would it be cheating to use a paintbrush unless you've crafted it yourself? I also find it ironic that some of the biggest detractors of AI art are, themselves, exclusively digital artists.

caconym_ 4y ago
Personally I would draw the line where the tools I'm ultimately relying on to create art don't function at all without having millions of works by other artists baked into them. You can say that's how my brain is doing it anyway—and sure, you might be right to a first approximation—but isn't that the whole point? If I'm not even capable of executing that synthesis in some medium X myself, but rather have to outsource it to a computer program, then I'm more technician than artist. It's something I don't expect people who have never seriously engaged with an artistic process to understand. Art is interesting when the artist discovered things in creating it, and you are not going to discover much by typing in a few sentences of prompt and maybe touching up the image (or story, or whatever) the model makes for you. "Cheating" is a loaded and generally unsuitable word based on an infantile understanding of why art matters. The universe doesn't give a shit whether you do it yourself or get a machine to do it for you, and neither do I, really. Modulo speculative impacts on economy and culture, these are obviously useful tools and I don't have any moral issue with people using them. But I will say that if those people are aiming to create art rather than engage in a process of design, then by using these tools in their primary creative workflows they are depriving themselves of a priceless journey. That's why it matters. It's a bit like sitting in your car at a trailhead and flying a drone out to the end of the trail and back rather than doing the walking yourself. Not only are you potentially ruining the experience for others (see: the recent Clarke's World closure to submissions), you're vastly cheapening it for yourself too. Most people in today's discourse are focusing on the former, but I think the latter is more interesting and important.
- YeGoblynQueenne 4y ago
  Great point, but then, I went for an art degree before I turned to computer science, so I know exactly what you mean. The act of artistic creation itself is rewarding, in a way very different to looking at art created by someone else. As a counterpoint, though, I note that I've done some work on language generation and that, too, is something that can engage the user, and can be almost as rewarding as e.g. writing a story. Though that's much more so if the language generator is your own piece of work. I'll also add that we appreciate artists who develop their own, unique personal style much more than artists who copy those of others. So far, neural net image generators have not been shown capable of creating their own styles, unless of course one considers artifacts of their generation process (e.g. monster hands) as a "style". People severely overestimate the "creativity" of such systems.
  - caconym_ 4y ago
    > As a counterpoint, though, I note that I've done some work on language generation and that, too, is something that can engage the user, and can be almost as rewarding as e.g. writing a story. Though that's much more so if the language generator is your own piece of work. Writing fiction is my thing, and I've seriously considered using AI to generate descriptive passages and other relative "filler" as a force multiplier. Either way, I'd be interested to see how well I could get a model to imitate my style. I think I'm waiting until it's easy to run a GPT-3-class thing locally, which IIUC isn't currently the case. I don't like building workflows that rely on "cloud" stuff. "Force multiplier" is the key, though. Another example might be somebody writing a story and then using AI to generate illustrations for it. I can also imagine future image generation AI allowing much finer control over the results, which would (IMO) make it much more akin to photography (and legitimize some of those arguments that have been popping up everywhere, including in this thread). Letting the computer provide the vision and direction as well as the technique is fun, for sure. I had a lot of fun with Stable Diffusion. But it's as you say—the current state of the art is highly imitative, and I think these capabilities will ultimately frustrate serious creators of art and serious consumers of it.

luma 4y ago

It absolutely happened with the advent of photography that was certain to destroy the lives of hard working painters. Those painters at the time were mostly employed to paint pictures of rich people and something that could "easily" perform the same task to create images of mere commoners was a clear sign of impending doom. What happened instead is, free of the requirement to appease rich people, what we now call "modern art" was created.

causi 4y ago
That's an excellent point. There are many parallels between criticisms of AI art that call it "just typing in a prompt" and calling photography "just aiming a camera". Does the fact that anybody can point their phone and create an image subtract from the "art-ness" of a professional photographer?
- luma 4y ago
  Many people in the art world at the time argued exactly that, just like they are doing today. From the photographers side it took lobbying, an act of congress, and a supreme court decision to finally grant copyright protection to photographs.
throwaway4aday 4y ago
> free of the requirement to appease rich people I don't believe this is the case now and it probably hasn't been for a long time, at least since the popularity of modern art exploded. Maybe it was true when the genre was still underground or generally reviled?
- causi 4y ago
  You know he's talking about the invention and proliferation of photography, right? AKA two hundred years ago.
- luma 4y ago
  Check your timelines: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_photography https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_photography https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Modern_art https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Modern_art The thing you are implying is explicitly what I am claiming in the post.