18 ms·

Striking portraits, claimed to be original, were generated on Midjourney

98 points by danboarder 4y ago

Mistletoe 4y ago
The ultimate drug in a century will be anything authentic at all. Deckard : Is this a real snake? Zhora : Of course it's not real. You think I would be working in a place like this if I could afford a real snake?
southernplaces7 4y ago
Two points after reading both the comments in this thread and the article itself: First, it's amazing how many people on this site have no bloody notion of what the artistic, compositional and qualitative side of real photography means. Their idea of this AI-rendered, prompt-generated stuff being the same as going out and taking real portraits while collecting their human stories is so absurdly, stupidly, blandly utilitarian that it just leaves a bad taste about the general emotional vacuity of tech types. Secondly, the creator of this IG feed was blatantly dishonest and then later fessed up about it. If there's anything creative about that it's in the area of creative mendacity, a thing that any common grifter or crypto-bro can pull off. It hardly demonstrates much artistic talent or nobility. With that said, it's interesting how many here defend this kind of dishonesty in this context, though they'd happily throw all kinds of shit on someone being equally dishonest in another tech context, such as in crypto or NFTs. emotional bias very visible.
burnished 4y ago
Wow, super neat. I could imagine doing something like that as a joke and have it launch unexpectedly out of control. I applaud the decision to come clean, I don't know if it was done to prove a point but it did make a statement
- nerdponx 4y ago
  Pre-emptive damage control. If someone else found them out, it'd be a scandal and it would follow them forever. This way they get to keep a good fraction of their accumulated fame without long-term reputational damage.
nobrains 4y ago
So, get fame based on lie and then come clean. Had he mentioned that they were AI generated, he might not have got the exposure (since anyone could do it). This would have been fine if it was a researcher (not a photographer) who was doing this.
dorkwood 4y ago
One could argue that generating portraits with Midjourney is actually harder than taking real photographs, since photographers spend only milliseconds taking their photos whereas prompt engineers sometimes spend hours copying text from PromptHero or Lexica and pasting it into Discord.
- contrast 4y ago
  Pressing ctrl-v takes hours?
- whiplash451 4y ago
  A lot of photographers take hours (or days) to find the right spot, wait for the right shooting conditions and then post-process their photos.
  - pbhjpbhj 4y ago
    This process to me is not really photography. They're making a photorealistic composition. Why bother with all that work, getting the conditions right, when you're going to photoshop it afterwards? Cue sunshine telling me how all photographic images have post-shot interpretative processing(?).
    - lolc 4y ago
      When I use tools to create a composite where the disk of the sun is visible through clouds, and the back of a mountain below is added from a second shot, is this not photography? Because it allows the viewer to see a scene a camera with its limited dynamic range cannot capture in one shot. Yes the editing may take hours. Grayscale is not very realistic, is it? Yet we adapt our perception and agree that it captures some reality. One can use the tools to create a representation of the scene so that observers would agree this is what they saw. And one can use the tools to create a new scene from pieces. I like to take pictures of scenery with the moon in it. I have no problem using different contrast settings for the moon. But I wouldn't allow myself to move the moon around in the image. Why not? When we use computers to create faces combining millions of shots, it can be argued that this is photography too. (Though I do struggle to use the term here.) The deception comes in only when we present the scene as having existed on its own.
forgotusername6 4y ago
His descriptions of the people are so floral that it makes me wonder if the whole thing of "portrait photographer on Instagram" could itself be considered a piece of performance art
- Aardwolf 4y ago
  It made me wonder if the descriptions were also AI-generated!
  - mahathu 4y ago
    I was thinking the same. > Lucy's Love Lucy is a strong woman from the Bronx - she is unapologetically herself and she loves it. > Every morning she wakes up at the crack of dawn and takes the subway to her job downtown. She works for a big law firm, and she knows the ins and outs of the courtroom like the back of her hand. > But on the weekends, she's a different person. She loves to explore the streets of the Bronx with her girlfriends, and they always find something new and exciting to do. > Today, they've decided to take a trip to the Bronx Zoo. Lucy loves animals and can't wait to see all the different species. She's especially excited to see the giraffes - she's heard they have the most beautiful eyes. > The day passes quickly and they spend hours exploring the zoo. They laugh, they talk, and they take lots of pictures. > When it's time to go, Lucy feels an overwhelming sense of happiness. She loves the Bronx, and she loves the people in it. She's proud to call it her home and she wouldn't want it any other way. > Lucy takes the subway back to her apartment and smiles as she remembers the day. It's like someone was trying to come up with the blandest, stereotypical piece of garbage of a background story for a character. Sounds like something ChatGPT could have written.
  - esperent 4y ago
    I hope so because the alternative is that a human wrote that milquetoast drivel and I'd like to think we're better than that.
- tqkxzugoaupvwqr 4y ago
  Next week we’ll hear a story about how he used generative text AI to write the descriptions.
madaxe_again 4y ago
“Hyperrealist artist who found fame at the Paris lycée for his portraits has confessed images were photographs”
- amelius 4y ago
  The thing is, we appreciate art not just based on qualities of the final product, but also based on how it was created.
  - madaxe_again 4y ago
    Do we? Marcel Duchamp springs to mind. He’d just pick up an object and declare it art. Piero Manzoni shat in cans. If that’s a creative process, I am positively proliferous.
    - amelius 4y ago
      This only supports the argument that it's not the qualities of the final product that make something art.
      - madaxe_again 4y ago
        I disagree, but even if I let you have that point, what about Cariou v. Prince? If taking a photograph of someone else’s photograph is legally considered a novel work, then how does AI differ? https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cariou_v._Prince https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cariou_v._Prince
        amelius 4y ago
        Well, apparently, it differs in the sense that people don't call the final product art.
        madaxe_again 4y ago
        They do. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Appropriation_(art) https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Appropriation_(art)
throw_m239339 4y ago
> Lucy is a strong woman from the Bronx - she is unapologetically herself and she loves it. That's some DnD level of character sheet...
MezzoDelCammin 4y ago
I admit to having had him on my IG for several months together with other portrait photographers as an inspiration and a way to improve my own portrait skills. I had no idea. And thinking about this now, I find what he's done brilliant. It shows in a very simple and concise way how far the generative AI has been for months now. And it shows (and proves) this to people who otherwise wouldn't be playing with any diffusion models otherwise. In a way it blows your mind. If that's not art, I don't know what is.
- baby 4y ago
  It’s interesting because I always imagined that artists would be the last ones to be replaced by technology. I guess it really shows that we have no way to predict the future.
  - eru 4y ago
    > I guess it really shows that we have no way to predict the future. I don't think one failed prediction invalidates all predictions? We have already partially replaced artists with technology. Have a look at how photography changed painting (eg painting portraits is no longer the staple breadwinner it used to be). Or see how recorded music removed the need for each bar to have their own performer. In the past technology just meant that we re-defined art and what it means to be an artist. We will continue to do so in the future.
    - imiric 4y ago
      > Have a look at how photography changed painting (eg painting portraits is no longer the staple breadwinner it used to be). Has it, though? You can make a point that photorealism in painting has been technically superseded by photography, but we still find such paintings enjoyable and impressive. Sure, there's a smaller market demand from a purely practical perspective, but photorealistic paintings are still popular, and demonstrate the artist's skill and craftsmanship. Technology can never replace art. It can just enhance it, broaden our abilities, and give us new perspectives to enjoy it.
smusamashah 4y ago
I will reiterate that if you had spent some time on StableDiffusion or MidJourney subreddit, lots of his images immediately look clearly AI generated. Some are missing skin pores (some models are good at this now) the tiny details on the face are very very vague and blurry (see lines or pores) details blend into each other (try following some strands of hair, their origins are very vague). Eyes are usually bad with AI, this person has clearly copy pasted same eye in both eyes (exact same reflection in both). There is a picture of old lady which is so bad (melted plastic face) that I don't know how anyone would take it for real. May be because I consciously look for details. To untrained eye (who don't know what SD or MJ is capable of) they may not look further.
pksebben 4y ago
This is such a poorly constructed hit piece, it almost doesn't warrant an investigation. ... almost... But! we're here, so let's dive in. | Oftentimes, Avery provided the subject’s name and a cutesy anecdote about their life, such as Lucy, “a strong woman from the Bronx,” sure, also a bio that is obviously made up, even if he hadn't added this: | (Fictional story. Let us know in the comments if you like a tale in the caption.) which the post includes, right after making that statement ... then there's this blatant gem: | among the myriad hashtags that accompanied each image, not one mentioned A.I. art or generative art. .. so okay, there's no hashtag, but a number of his posts have | Photo? AI-generated? Both? So, to believe he's trying to hoodwink you into thinking it's just photography, when the completely obvious point is to create a discussion, you'd have to be lazy, not paying attention, or trying to sell me on a piece of ragebait. Or all of the above. This just in: fake generated rage posted under the guise of journalism.
- thom 4y ago
  Didn’t he explicitly deny they were AI generated at one point?
  - pksebben 4y ago
    according to the article, which provides no references to such an incident, but does highlight the word "dishonesty" with a link, when taking about him. Too bad that the link leads to an article that doesn't mention Joe Avery at all [1] You know, like when you present a link as if it means something knowing practically nobody is going to click on it. like a lie. 1 https://news.artnet.com/art-world/fake-artists-collectors-instagram-2059155 https://news.artnet.com/art-world/fake-artists-collectors-in...
- jxf 4y ago
  > So, to believe he's trying to hoodwink you into thinking it's just photography [...] you'd have to be lazy, not paying attention, or trying to sell me on a piece of ragebait. Or all of the above. I think you missed this part: > A further issue stemmed from Avery having previously denied that the images were A.I.-generated and were, in fact, taken on a Nikon D810. People might have been "hoodwinked", to use your words, that it was photography if in fact he told them "I made this with a camera". Those people might then also be reasonably upset to learn they were lied to.
auveair 4y ago
"IG fame" here is 28,000 followers for anyone wondering.
- autoexec 4y ago
  I looks like he only had 12k when he confessed. How on earth is that "Fame"? > "[My Instagram account] has blown up to nearly 12K followers since October, more than I expected," wrote Avery when he first reached out to Ars Technica in January. "Because it is where I post AI-generated, human-finished portraits. Probably 95%+ of the followers don't realize. I'd like to come clean." (https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2023/02/viral-instagram-photographer-has-a-confession-his-photos-are-ai-generated/ https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2023/02/viral...) The article goes own to say: "With Midjourney, anyone can pay a subscription fee for the privilege of generating art from text-based descriptions" Google says 1k followers costs between $12-$30. Getting bots to follow you for three months seems pretty cheap... could this have been some kind of weird self-promotion or an ad for the AI? He felt so guilty that his first thought was to run to the media? This whole thing just seems off to me somehow... Maybe I'm being too skeptical, but it seems like instagram is worse than other social media sites when it comes to shameless self-promotion, "influencers" who are basically undisclosed paid advertisers, fake accounts scamming people etc.
precompute 4y ago
Really? They clearly look generated. Not sure a "confession" was necessary here.
- mym1990 4y ago
  Thought so as well, although it is unfortunate that I had looked at the work after knowing the context. As someone who has been doing photography for 10+ years and spent most of it shooting on a D800, these images are a far cry from the quality that DSLRs give.
- throwaway742 4y ago
  One of them is straight up the "Chad" meme. It's blatantly obvious.
- asar 4y ago
  Definitely thought the same. Even for the most realistic ones, something about the eyes always stands out to me. Can't really pinpoint it though, maybe they are too perfect (as in round) or the ratio of pupil/iris is always exactly the same?
ahmed_ds 4y ago
I wonder when they invented paintbrush, did all the people using fingers to draw called the brush-painters, posers. Cave painters said "You can't capture the beauty of fingerpaint as you drag our fingers against a chunk of rock. The virgin rock was porous, your paint smooths it and creating impression that lasts for centuries. You leave your mark, your identity, your fingerprint with the art. That is what makes it authentic." He added, "Painting with brushes creates a barrier with the art and the human. It can never be true art. It will never capture the painters mark and your soul in it." --- That was a poor attempt at making a joke. I think, over the years, most people just stopped caring about the origin and process of scrollable things. You just don't have the time or energy to validate everything's source or process. You take nano-dopamine hit by seeing something, and move past that. Trying to label things to be "pure" and "authenticate" and asking the merit to be determined based on this "purity" is a thing of the past.
- gpderetta 4y ago
  AI is the ultimate Death of The Author.
mahathu 4y ago
> Lucy's Love Lucy is a strong woman from the Bronx - she is unapologetically herself and she loves it. > Every morning she wakes up at the crack of dawn and takes the subway to her job downtown. She works for a big law firm, and she knows the ins and outs of the courtroom like the back of her hand. > But on the weekends, she's a different person. She loves to explore the streets of the Bronx with her girlfriends, and they always find something new and exciting to do. > Today, they've decided to take a trip to the Bronx Zoo. Lucy loves animals and can't wait to see all the different species. She's especially excited to see the giraffes - she's heard they have the most beautiful eyes. > The day passes quickly and they spend hours exploring the zoo. They laugh, they talk, and they take lots of pictures. > When it's time to go, Lucy feels an overwhelming sense of happiness. She loves the Bronx, and she loves the people in it. She's proud to call it her home and she wouldn't want it any other way. > Lucy takes the subway back to her apartment and smiles as she remembers the day. Surely these descriptions are also AI generated?? I actually got angry reading this at how bland and "non-offensive" this story is, lol. Is there a word for that? Also, which part of this made up story should Lucy hypothetically feel apologetic for (as suggested in the opening sentence)? Loving animals and the Bronx?
- 22c 4y ago
  > Is there a word for that? Milquetoast, perhaps.
- pbhjpbhj 4y ago
  One might be unapologetically predictable and humdrum. But yes, reading that text does have a feel of AI generation or at least purposefully derivative writing.
- neom 4y ago
  They read exactly like LLM.... I mean maybe he wrote it, but... it reads so much a GPT I'm inclined to think it is.
aaron695 4y ago
[dead]
neom 4y ago
I was in the first cohort of the first digital imaging and technology program in Canada, almost 20 years ago. Our final year "Salon de Paris"[1] the short that won was a young child playing in a puddle in front of an anti-abortion protest, it was great, thought provoking, and really well timed... we thought. After it was announced as winning, we found out that the creator had gone out and shot the protest, and then the next week gone out and shot a toddler playing then digitally combined them. There was an outcry from my peers who thought it was deceptive, but our dean said: "The most creative people simply to the best job of hiding the source of their creativity". AI or not, they're good images, "deception" in art has been going on since forever. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Salon_(Paris) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Salon_(Paris)
helsinkiandrew 4y ago
> among the myriad hashtags that accompanied each image, not one mentioned A.I. art or generative art. He's pretty haphazard with his hashtagging - changing the style and contents over time - but his very first post has the #ai #aiart hashtags (as well as #naturephotography) and it seems to pop up every now and then https://www.instagram.com/p/CjqQF9zuvkW/ https://www.instagram.com/p/CjqQF9zuvkW/ If I were a real photographer I might get upset that my photos were being used by the tool he used. But there's so much use of filters and staged lifestyle photos on Instagram I'm not sure he really deserves the hate he's getting
- Shaggy2000 4y ago
  The tools learned to draw like artists do. By looking at reference images. So no need for anyone to be annoyed, the tools arent using other peoples photos.
  - helsinkiandrew 4y ago
    Midjourny have admitted they scrape training images and text from the internet. When you say “create a photorealistic image” presumably it will be relying more on the photos it’s scraped. https://www.vice.com/en/article/dy7b5y/artists-are-suing-over-stable-diffusion-stealing-their-work-for-ai-art https://www.vice.com/en/article/dy7b5y/artists-are-suing-ove...
Shaggy2000 4y ago
Artists gaslight everyone else and say their work has soul so that they can gatekeep "art" saying it can't be replicated by a machine or a modern artist (AI Artist). However it is not soul it is egoism. The artist spent thousands of hours developing a style to make it seem like they are special. To someone with real intelligence and creativity this level of toil is unbearable and there is no motivation to do it simply to satisfy their ego because a real artist has no ego, they hack around for the fun of it. In reality , the end product is always just paint on a canvas that has specific patterns and style applied to it and this can be replicated and improved upon by an AI Artist. The machine simply automates away the middle man, pointless egoism and the toil.
- Applejinx 4y ago
  The only words I'd omit are, 'to make it seem like' :) You do you, by all means fight for your right to be accepted and loved as the creative person who just randomly does whatever and it's just as good. Be natural! By all means. At the end of the day you've gotta be what you are and the integrity of that matters. Without the toil, you ain't me. Ego is a malignant master. As a rule the folks who rise so high accomplishing such elaborate, auteurist things are MISERABLE, just awful humans. They're driven in a way that doesn't exempt them from the consequence: they are as awful to themselves as they are to others and the prizes they produce are some compensation for what they've been through. Of course they'll flip out when you come around, mister natural, and say that you deserve equal cred—more!—for just hacking around and having fun. They needn't flip out. Neither you nor the AI are going to be them. It's you who are the middle man, in pointless egolessness. Take heart in this: you're closer to the mainstream. If you add enough ego and toil you can get to where NOBODY 'gets you' and die in weird obscurity. Which is kind of fun too :) but there will always be more people like you, not very special, able to reach the mass appeal more sincerely and easily. Except now, AI is better at that than you will ever be ;)
Applejinx 4y ago
So he's a writer. All righty then… What I'm seeing is, he guided the construction of an evocative face, and then told an effective story about it, and THEN put it forth. It looks like he habitually adds 'fictional story' to the blurb. The guy is a writer. If his stuff is taking off (or was), it's on the strength of his characterization, and that's perfectly legitimate. It might also be taking advantage of a hidden strength of AI: it's only us, it's only a mass-appeal take that much like ChatGPT goes for common knowledge and isn't interested in truth or novelty, and that is a way to hit an artistic mass audience with something they respond to. The guy's a writer with a reasonably good artist's eye and the ability to see a resonant character, perhaps not a particularly deep one. There's gonna be lots more of this and one thing you'll eventually see is that these folks are as interchangeable as the AI works they produce. If you don't like him there will be another. There will also be people using the technology to carve out a more interesting spot for themselves that will NOT hit the mainstream, because they're not pandering half as much. But for every one of them there will be 99 folks with computers and a decent eye, who hit much bigger because their pandering is perfectly sincere. What they like is typical and common, and they'll go for the low hanging tropes and hit it really big by sincerely pursuing unambitious goals with some degree of skill and tenacity. Worked for JK Rowling.
deleted 4y ago
[deleted]

98 points by danboarder 4y ago

The ultimate drug in a century will be anything authentic at all. Deckard : Is this a real snake? Zhora : Of course it's not real. You think I would be working in a place like this if I could afford a real snake?

southernplaces7 4y ago

Two points after reading both the comments in this thread and the article itself: First, it's amazing how many people on this site have no bloody notion of what the artistic, compositional and qualitative side of real photography means. Their idea of this AI-rendered, prompt-generated stuff being the same as going out and taking real portraits while collecting their human stories is so absurdly, stupidly, blandly utilitarian that it just leaves a bad taste about the general emotional vacuity of tech types. Secondly, the creator of this IG feed was blatantly dishonest and then later fessed up about it. If there's anything creative about that it's in the area of creative mendacity, a thing that any common grifter or crypto-bro can pull off. It hardly demonstrates much artistic talent or nobility. With that said, it's interesting how many here defend this kind of dishonesty in this context, though they'd happily throw all kinds of shit on someone being equally dishonest in another tech context, such as in crypto or NFTs. emotional bias very visible.

burnished 4y ago

Wow, super neat. I could imagine doing something like that as a joke and have it launch unexpectedly out of control. I applaud the decision to come clean, I don't know if it was done to prove a point but it did make a statement

nerdponx 4y ago
Pre-emptive damage control. If someone else found them out, it'd be a scandal and it would follow them forever. This way they get to keep a good fraction of their accumulated fame without long-term reputational damage.

nobrains 4y ago

So, get fame based on lie and then come clean. Had he mentioned that they were AI generated, he might not have got the exposure (since anyone could do it). This would have been fine if it was a researcher (not a photographer) who was doing this.

dorkwood 4y ago

One could argue that generating portraits with Midjourney is actually harder than taking real photographs, since photographers spend only milliseconds taking their photos whereas prompt engineers sometimes spend hours copying text from PromptHero or Lexica and pasting it into Discord.

contrast 4y ago
Pressing ctrl-v takes hours?
whiplash451 4y ago
A lot of photographers take hours (or days) to find the right spot, wait for the right shooting conditions and then post-process their photos.
- pbhjpbhj 4y ago
  This process to me is not really photography. They're making a photorealistic composition. Why bother with all that work, getting the conditions right, when you're going to photoshop it afterwards? Cue sunshine telling me how all photographic images have post-shot interpretative processing(?).
  - lolc 4y ago
    When I use tools to create a composite where the disk of the sun is visible through clouds, and the back of a mountain below is added from a second shot, is this not photography? Because it allows the viewer to see a scene a camera with its limited dynamic range cannot capture in one shot. Yes the editing may take hours. Grayscale is not very realistic, is it? Yet we adapt our perception and agree that it captures some reality. One can use the tools to create a representation of the scene so that observers would agree this is what they saw. And one can use the tools to create a new scene from pieces. I like to take pictures of scenery with the moon in it. I have no problem using different contrast settings for the moon. But I wouldn't allow myself to move the moon around in the image. Why not? When we use computers to create faces combining millions of shots, it can be argued that this is photography too. (Though I do struggle to use the term here.) The deception comes in only when we present the scene as having existed on its own.

forgotusername6 4y ago

His descriptions of the people are so floral that it makes me wonder if the whole thing of "portrait photographer on Instagram" could itself be considered a piece of performance art

Aardwolf 4y ago
It made me wonder if the descriptions were also AI-generated!
- mahathu 4y ago
  I was thinking the same. > Lucy's Love Lucy is a strong woman from the Bronx - she is unapologetically herself and she loves it. > Every morning she wakes up at the crack of dawn and takes the subway to her job downtown. She works for a big law firm, and she knows the ins and outs of the courtroom like the back of her hand. > But on the weekends, she's a different person. She loves to explore the streets of the Bronx with her girlfriends, and they always find something new and exciting to do. > Today, they've decided to take a trip to the Bronx Zoo. Lucy loves animals and can't wait to see all the different species. She's especially excited to see the giraffes - she's heard they have the most beautiful eyes. > The day passes quickly and they spend hours exploring the zoo. They laugh, they talk, and they take lots of pictures. > When it's time to go, Lucy feels an overwhelming sense of happiness. She loves the Bronx, and she loves the people in it. She's proud to call it her home and she wouldn't want it any other way. > Lucy takes the subway back to her apartment and smiles as she remembers the day. It's like someone was trying to come up with the blandest, stereotypical piece of garbage of a background story for a character. Sounds like something ChatGPT could have written.
- esperent 4y ago
  I hope so because the alternative is that a human wrote that milquetoast drivel and I'd like to think we're better than that.
tqkxzugoaupvwqr 4y ago
Next week we’ll hear a story about how he used generative text AI to write the descriptions.

madaxe_again 4y ago

“Hyperrealist artist who found fame at the Paris lycée for his portraits has confessed images were photographs”

amelius 4y ago
The thing is, we appreciate art not just based on qualities of the final product, but also based on how it was created.
- madaxe_again 4y ago
  Do we? Marcel Duchamp springs to mind. He’d just pick up an object and declare it art. Piero Manzoni shat in cans. If that’s a creative process, I am positively proliferous.
  - amelius 4y ago
    This only supports the argument that it's not the qualities of the final product that make something art.
    - madaxe_again 4y ago
      I disagree, but even if I let you have that point, what about Cariou v. Prince? If taking a photograph of someone else’s photograph is legally considered a novel work, then how does AI differ? https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cariou_v._Prince https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cariou_v._Prince
      - amelius 4y ago
        Well, apparently, it differs in the sense that people don't call the final product art.
        madaxe_again 4y ago
        They do. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Appropriation_(art) https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Appropriation_(art)

throw_m239339 4y ago

> Lucy is a strong woman from the Bronx - she is unapologetically herself and she loves it. That's some DnD level of character sheet...

MezzoDelCammin 4y ago

I admit to having had him on my IG for several months together with other portrait photographers as an inspiration and a way to improve my own portrait skills. I had no idea. And thinking about this now, I find what he's done brilliant. It shows in a very simple and concise way how far the generative AI has been for months now. And it shows (and proves) this to people who otherwise wouldn't be playing with any diffusion models otherwise. In a way it blows your mind. If that's not art, I don't know what is.

baby 4y ago
It’s interesting because I always imagined that artists would be the last ones to be replaced by technology. I guess it really shows that we have no way to predict the future.
- eru 4y ago
  > I guess it really shows that we have no way to predict the future. I don't think one failed prediction invalidates all predictions? We have already partially replaced artists with technology. Have a look at how photography changed painting (eg painting portraits is no longer the staple breadwinner it used to be). Or see how recorded music removed the need for each bar to have their own performer. In the past technology just meant that we re-defined art and what it means to be an artist. We will continue to do so in the future.
  - imiric 4y ago
    > Have a look at how photography changed painting (eg painting portraits is no longer the staple breadwinner it used to be). Has it, though? You can make a point that photorealism in painting has been technically superseded by photography, but we still find such paintings enjoyable and impressive. Sure, there's a smaller market demand from a purely practical perspective, but photorealistic paintings are still popular, and demonstrate the artist's skill and craftsmanship. Technology can never replace art. It can just enhance it, broaden our abilities, and give us new perspectives to enjoy it.

smusamashah 4y ago

I will reiterate that if you had spent some time on StableDiffusion or MidJourney subreddit, lots of his images immediately look clearly AI generated. Some are missing skin pores (some models are good at this now) the tiny details on the face are very very vague and blurry (see lines or pores) details blend into each other (try following some strands of hair, their origins are very vague). Eyes are usually bad with AI, this person has clearly copy pasted same eye in both eyes (exact same reflection in both). There is a picture of old lady which is so bad (melted plastic face) that I don't know how anyone would take it for real. May be because I consciously look for details. To untrained eye (who don't know what SD or MJ is capable of) they may not look further.

pksebben 4y ago

This is such a poorly constructed hit piece, it almost doesn't warrant an investigation. ... almost... But! we're here, so let's dive in. | Oftentimes, Avery provided the subject’s name and a cutesy anecdote about their life, such as Lucy, “a strong woman from the Bronx,” sure, also a bio that is obviously made up, even if he hadn't added this: | (Fictional story. Let us know in the comments if you like a tale in the caption.) which the post includes, right after making that statement ... then there's this blatant gem: | among the myriad hashtags that accompanied each image, not one mentioned A.I. art or generative art. .. so okay, there's no hashtag, but a number of his posts have | Photo? AI-generated? Both? So, to believe he's trying to hoodwink you into thinking it's just photography, when the completely obvious point is to create a discussion, you'd have to be lazy, not paying attention, or trying to sell me on a piece of ragebait. Or all of the above. This just in: fake generated rage posted under the guise of journalism.

thom 4y ago
Didn’t he explicitly deny they were AI generated at one point?
- pksebben 4y ago
  according to the article, which provides no references to such an incident, but does highlight the word "dishonesty" with a link, when taking about him. Too bad that the link leads to an article that doesn't mention Joe Avery at all [1] You know, like when you present a link as if it means something knowing practically nobody is going to click on it. like a lie. 1 https://news.artnet.com/art-world/fake-artists-collectors-instagram-2059155 https://news.artnet.com/art-world/fake-artists-collectors-in...
jxf 4y ago
> So, to believe he's trying to hoodwink you into thinking it's just photography [...] you'd have to be lazy, not paying attention, or trying to sell me on a piece of ragebait. Or all of the above. I think you missed this part: > A further issue stemmed from Avery having previously denied that the images were A.I.-generated and were, in fact, taken on a Nikon D810. People might have been "hoodwinked", to use your words, that it was photography if in fact he told them "I made this with a camera". Those people might then also be reasonably upset to learn they were lied to.

auveair 4y ago

"IG fame" here is 28,000 followers for anyone wondering.

autoexec 4y ago
I looks like he only had 12k when he confessed. How on earth is that "Fame"? > "[My Instagram account] has blown up to nearly 12K followers since October, more than I expected," wrote Avery when he first reached out to Ars Technica in January. "Because it is where I post AI-generated, human-finished portraits. Probably 95%+ of the followers don't realize. I'd like to come clean." (https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2023/02/viral-instagram-photographer-has-a-confession-his-photos-are-ai-generated/ https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2023/02/viral...) The article goes own to say: "With Midjourney, anyone can pay a subscription fee for the privilege of generating art from text-based descriptions" Google says 1k followers costs between $12-$30. Getting bots to follow you for three months seems pretty cheap... could this have been some kind of weird self-promotion or an ad for the AI? He felt so guilty that his first thought was to run to the media? This whole thing just seems off to me somehow... Maybe I'm being too skeptical, but it seems like instagram is worse than other social media sites when it comes to shameless self-promotion, "influencers" who are basically undisclosed paid advertisers, fake accounts scamming people etc.

precompute 4y ago

Really? They clearly look generated. Not sure a "confession" was necessary here.

mym1990 4y ago
Thought so as well, although it is unfortunate that I had looked at the work after knowing the context. As someone who has been doing photography for 10+ years and spent most of it shooting on a D800, these images are a far cry from the quality that DSLRs give.
throwaway742 4y ago
One of them is straight up the "Chad" meme. It's blatantly obvious.
asar 4y ago
Definitely thought the same. Even for the most realistic ones, something about the eyes always stands out to me. Can't really pinpoint it though, maybe they are too perfect (as in round) or the ratio of pupil/iris is always exactly the same?

ahmed_ds 4y ago

I wonder when they invented paintbrush, did all the people using fingers to draw called the brush-painters, posers. Cave painters said "You can't capture the beauty of fingerpaint as you drag our fingers against a chunk of rock. The virgin rock was porous, your paint smooths it and creating impression that lasts for centuries. You leave your mark, your identity, your fingerprint with the art. That is what makes it authentic." He added, "Painting with brushes creates a barrier with the art and the human. It can never be true art. It will never capture the painters mark and your soul in it." --- That was a poor attempt at making a joke. I think, over the years, most people just stopped caring about the origin and process of scrollable things. You just don't have the time or energy to validate everything's source or process. You take nano-dopamine hit by seeing something, and move past that. Trying to label things to be "pure" and "authenticate" and asking the merit to be determined based on this "purity" is a thing of the past.

gpderetta 4y ago
AI is the ultimate Death of The Author.

mahathu 4y ago

> Lucy's Love Lucy is a strong woman from the Bronx - she is unapologetically herself and she loves it. > Every morning she wakes up at the crack of dawn and takes the subway to her job downtown. She works for a big law firm, and she knows the ins and outs of the courtroom like the back of her hand. > But on the weekends, she's a different person. She loves to explore the streets of the Bronx with her girlfriends, and they always find something new and exciting to do. > Today, they've decided to take a trip to the Bronx Zoo. Lucy loves animals and can't wait to see all the different species. She's especially excited to see the giraffes - she's heard they have the most beautiful eyes. > The day passes quickly and they spend hours exploring the zoo. They laugh, they talk, and they take lots of pictures. > When it's time to go, Lucy feels an overwhelming sense of happiness. She loves the Bronx, and she loves the people in it. She's proud to call it her home and she wouldn't want it any other way. > Lucy takes the subway back to her apartment and smiles as she remembers the day. Surely these descriptions are also AI generated?? I actually got angry reading this at how bland and "non-offensive" this story is, lol. Is there a word for that? Also, which part of this made up story should Lucy hypothetically feel apologetic for (as suggested in the opening sentence)? Loving animals and the Bronx?

22c 4y ago
> Is there a word for that? Milquetoast, perhaps.
pbhjpbhj 4y ago
One might be unapologetically predictable and humdrum. But yes, reading that text does have a feel of AI generation or at least purposefully derivative writing.
neom 4y ago
They read exactly like LLM.... I mean maybe he wrote it, but... it reads so much a GPT I'm inclined to think it is.

aaron695 4y ago

[dead]

neom 4y ago

I was in the first cohort of the first digital imaging and technology program in Canada, almost 20 years ago. Our final year "Salon de Paris"[1] the short that won was a young child playing in a puddle in front of an anti-abortion protest, it was great, thought provoking, and really well timed... we thought. After it was announced as winning, we found out that the creator had gone out and shot the protest, and then the next week gone out and shot a toddler playing then digitally combined them. There was an outcry from my peers who thought it was deceptive, but our dean said: "The most creative people simply to the best job of hiding the source of their creativity". AI or not, they're good images, "deception" in art has been going on since forever. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Salon_(Paris) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Salon_(Paris)

helsinkiandrew 4y ago

> among the myriad hashtags that accompanied each image, not one mentioned A.I. art or generative art. He's pretty haphazard with his hashtagging - changing the style and contents over time - but his very first post has the #ai #aiart hashtags (as well as #naturephotography) and it seems to pop up every now and then https://www.instagram.com/p/CjqQF9zuvkW/ https://www.instagram.com/p/CjqQF9zuvkW/ If I were a real photographer I might get upset that my photos were being used by the tool he used. But there's so much use of filters and staged lifestyle photos on Instagram I'm not sure he really deserves the hate he's getting

Shaggy2000 4y ago
The tools learned to draw like artists do. By looking at reference images. So no need for anyone to be annoyed, the tools arent using other peoples photos.
- helsinkiandrew 4y ago
  Midjourny have admitted they scrape training images and text from the internet. When you say “create a photorealistic image” presumably it will be relying more on the photos it’s scraped. https://www.vice.com/en/article/dy7b5y/artists-are-suing-over-stable-diffusion-stealing-their-work-for-ai-art https://www.vice.com/en/article/dy7b5y/artists-are-suing-ove...

Shaggy2000 4y ago

Artists gaslight everyone else and say their work has soul so that they can gatekeep "art" saying it can't be replicated by a machine or a modern artist (AI Artist). However it is not soul it is egoism. The artist spent thousands of hours developing a style to make it seem like they are special. To someone with real intelligence and creativity this level of toil is unbearable and there is no motivation to do it simply to satisfy their ego because a real artist has no ego, they hack around for the fun of it. In reality , the end product is always just paint on a canvas that has specific patterns and style applied to it and this can be replicated and improved upon by an AI Artist. The machine simply automates away the middle man, pointless egoism and the toil.

Applejinx 4y ago
The only words I'd omit are, 'to make it seem like' :) You do you, by all means fight for your right to be accepted and loved as the creative person who just randomly does whatever and it's just as good. Be natural! By all means. At the end of the day you've gotta be what you are and the integrity of that matters. Without the toil, you ain't me. Ego is a malignant master. As a rule the folks who rise so high accomplishing such elaborate, auteurist things are MISERABLE, just awful humans. They're driven in a way that doesn't exempt them from the consequence: they are as awful to themselves as they are to others and the prizes they produce are some compensation for what they've been through. Of course they'll flip out when you come around, mister natural, and say that you deserve equal cred—more!—for just hacking around and having fun. They needn't flip out. Neither you nor the AI are going to be them. It's you who are the middle man, in pointless egolessness. Take heart in this: you're closer to the mainstream. If you add enough ego and toil you can get to where NOBODY 'gets you' and die in weird obscurity. Which is kind of fun too :) but there will always be more people like you, not very special, able to reach the mass appeal more sincerely and easily. Except now, AI is better at that than you will ever be ;)

Applejinx 4y ago

So he's a writer. All righty then… What I'm seeing is, he guided the construction of an evocative face, and then told an effective story about it, and THEN put it forth. It looks like he habitually adds 'fictional story' to the blurb. The guy is a writer. If his stuff is taking off (or was), it's on the strength of his characterization, and that's perfectly legitimate. It might also be taking advantage of a hidden strength of AI: it's only us, it's only a mass-appeal take that much like ChatGPT goes for common knowledge and isn't interested in truth or novelty, and that is a way to hit an artistic mass audience with something they respond to. The guy's a writer with a reasonably good artist's eye and the ability to see a resonant character, perhaps not a particularly deep one. There's gonna be lots more of this and one thing you'll eventually see is that these folks are as interchangeable as the AI works they produce. If you don't like him there will be another. There will also be people using the technology to carve out a more interesting spot for themselves that will NOT hit the mainstream, because they're not pandering half as much. But for every one of them there will be 99 folks with computers and a decent eye, who hit much bigger because their pandering is perfectly sincere. What they like is typical and common, and they'll go for the low hanging tropes and hit it really big by sincerely pursuing unambitious goals with some degree of skill and tenacity. Worked for JK Rowling.

deleted 4y ago

[deleted]