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In my head, I keep making this comparison to photography. I like to take pictures. Usually, I take many, many -- hundreds -- of pictures for a project and I'l

by jnovek 3y ago

In my head, I keep making this comparison to photography. I like to take pictures. Usually, I take many, many -- hundreds -- of pictures for a project and I'll find one or two that I like most in that bunch. I think this is a pretty common practice in photography, euphemistically referred to as portfolio editing. I see a strong analogy between portfolio editing and operation of AI like ChatGPT. The camera and the AI are both machines being operated by humans who have developed enough expertise with their respective machine to get the output that they want. If the camera can produce art, why can't the AI?

caconym_ 3y ago
I think it's fair to say that conceiving of a prompt and iterating it toward a desirable output can be artistically expressive. Where the comparison with cameras falls down for me is a) at least to date, writing prompts feels a lot less intentional and a lot more random (AI people themselves make heavy use of the term "cargo culting") than [arranging and] composing a photograph, and b) your camera can function from first principles without requiring the work of other photographers to be blended into an information slurry and loaded into its memory.
RichieAHB 3y ago
Taking a picture is deterministic. You aim at something, configure the settings and the cells / CMOS will capture that light in the right manner. You can argue that autofocus and portrait-mode are eroding this but ultimately, if you, the human are not pointing at something good in the first place, well you’ll very likely not have a very good picture. I feel like with AI and a random seed you can ask a question of which you have added none of your own reflection into and it will produce something somewhat in the ballpark that may pass as real. I.e. you don’t even have to point the camera at anything good … Edit: not to say you can’t use it as a muse or for inspiration, but it isn’t a prerequisite.
- jstarfish 3y ago
  You do have to provide novel input though, otherwise it's just a vending machine for motel art. Everybody is capable of generating the same generic crap by default, but if you're sufficiently creative in your prompt, it's no different than an artist having an assistant. The real problem is the long tail. You found a unique form of expression? Your work gets trained on and you get cut out of your own agency. I fully expect deliberately-bad art will become a thing, because it would be ruinous to datasets to be trained on, will stand out in a sea of KincaidDiffusions, and go generally unexamined by AI crawlers. Lomography was ahead of its time.
atoav 3y ago
How about instead of taking the camera, telling the AI to generate a statistically likely picture for you? For me, a guy with a master of fine arts and a photographer, filmmaker and musician, the problem with AI isn't, that it is a automated process that creates stuff, but that the stuff it creates isn't usually the kind that will suprise yourself. My best pieces of music, film scenes and pictures always came from very special and memorable circumstances, or by tweaking a many factors for a long time, and by reflecting on the results a magnitude longer. Beginner artists are already amazed at the fact that they managed to make a film, a drawing, a piece of music, a decent photograph. More advanced artists are much more about exploring the medium and figuring out what is possible. My fear is that AI will make art much less personal and much less explorative. Or maybe it will just have the opposite effect? At the dawn of photography all the painters started to become abstract for a reason — why mimic, what the apparatus does better?
librexpr 3y ago
You'll note that "photography" as an art has its own name and is considered a different art than painting or drawing. And if you took a photo and then said "I drew this", people would say you were lying. So personally I have no problem with considering GPT stuff "art", but I think it should be considered a separate art form and given a different name.
- pmoriarty 3y ago
  Why oes it matter if we call it "art" or not? AI creations are going to be enjoyed or not, used or not, given attention or not, just like human creations, regardless of what we call them. More and more I'm leaning towards seeing the whole category of "art" as nothing more than gatekeeping.
  - librexpr 3y ago
    I explicitly said that I don't mind calling it "art". I meant that things like "AI songwriting" should be given a different name than "songwriting" like "photography" has a different name than "painting", even though all of these things are considered "art". The name could be just "AI songwriting", or it could be some fancier name (like "photography" has a fancy name). Giving it a different name would also imply that you shouldn't submit AI songs to a songwriting competition, much like you wouldn't submit a photograph to a painting competition, but you could have separate competitions for AI songs, and separate competitions that accept anything, and so on.
- krapp 3y ago
  >So personally I have no problem with considering GPT stuff "art", but I think it should be considered a separate art form and given a different name. That name already exists - generative art.

by jnovek 3y ago

caconym_ 3y ago

I think it's fair to say that conceiving of a prompt and iterating it toward a desirable output can be artistically expressive. Where the comparison with cameras falls down for me is a) at least to date, writing prompts feels a lot less intentional and a lot more random (AI people themselves make heavy use of the term "cargo culting") than [arranging and] composing a photograph, and b) your camera can function from first principles without requiring the work of other photographers to be blended into an information slurry and loaded into its memory.

RichieAHB 3y ago

Taking a picture is deterministic. You aim at something, configure the settings and the cells / CMOS will capture that light in the right manner. You can argue that autofocus and portrait-mode are eroding this but ultimately, if you, the human are not pointing at something good in the first place, well you’ll very likely not have a very good picture. I feel like with AI and a random seed you can ask a question of which you have added none of your own reflection into and it will produce something somewhat in the ballpark that may pass as real. I.e. you don’t even have to point the camera at anything good … Edit: not to say you can’t use it as a muse or for inspiration, but it isn’t a prerequisite.

jstarfish 3y ago
You do have to provide novel input though, otherwise it's just a vending machine for motel art. Everybody is capable of generating the same generic crap by default, but if you're sufficiently creative in your prompt, it's no different than an artist having an assistant. The real problem is the long tail. You found a unique form of expression? Your work gets trained on and you get cut out of your own agency. I fully expect deliberately-bad art will become a thing, because it would be ruinous to datasets to be trained on, will stand out in a sea of KincaidDiffusions, and go generally unexamined by AI crawlers. Lomography was ahead of its time.

atoav 3y ago

How about instead of taking the camera, telling the AI to generate a statistically likely picture for you? For me, a guy with a master of fine arts and a photographer, filmmaker and musician, the problem with AI isn't, that it is a automated process that creates stuff, but that the stuff it creates isn't usually the kind that will suprise yourself. My best pieces of music, film scenes and pictures always came from very special and memorable circumstances, or by tweaking a many factors for a long time, and by reflecting on the results a magnitude longer. Beginner artists are already amazed at the fact that they managed to make a film, a drawing, a piece of music, a decent photograph. More advanced artists are much more about exploring the medium and figuring out what is possible. My fear is that AI will make art much less personal and much less explorative. Or maybe it will just have the opposite effect? At the dawn of photography all the painters started to become abstract for a reason — why mimic, what the apparatus does better?

librexpr 3y ago

You'll note that "photography" as an art has its own name and is considered a different art than painting or drawing. And if you took a photo and then said "I drew this", people would say you were lying. So personally I have no problem with considering GPT stuff "art", but I think it should be considered a separate art form and given a different name.

pmoriarty 3y ago
Why oes it matter if we call it "art" or not? AI creations are going to be enjoyed or not, used or not, given attention or not, just like human creations, regardless of what we call them. More and more I'm leaning towards seeing the whole category of "art" as nothing more than gatekeeping.
- librexpr 3y ago
  I explicitly said that I don't mind calling it "art". I meant that things like "AI songwriting" should be given a different name than "songwriting" like "photography" has a different name than "painting", even though all of these things are considered "art". The name could be just "AI songwriting", or it could be some fancier name (like "photography" has a fancy name). Giving it a different name would also imply that you shouldn't submit AI songs to a songwriting competition, much like you wouldn't submit a photograph to a painting competition, but you could have separate competitions for AI songs, and separate competitions that accept anything, and so on.
krapp 3y ago
>So personally I have no problem with considering GPT stuff "art", but I think it should be considered a separate art form and given a different name. That name already exists - generative art.