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Reading about advances in AI art is always bittersweet. Generative text-to-image systems have come very far in the past 2 years. Impressively so. Frankly, I am
by quenix 3y ago
Reading about advances in AI art is always bittersweet. Generative text-to-image systems have come very far in the past 2 years. Impressively so. Frankly, I am in awe at the (cherrypicked!) outputs on this page.
Years on, it's still a little hard to fully grasp the imminent, momentous impact this (has yet to have?) on commercial artists. I fear it will become pretty much impossible to make any sort of living off art in the next decade.
I mean: the outputs on the page are just awesome. Leagues ahead of the stuff we have now. And I'm already seeing old-gen generated AI images on corporate blog posts—everyone will jump on DALL-E 3.
Being in the profession right now must be very discouraging indeed. My heart goes out to those artists who will eventually be replaced by cheap, intuitive text prompts.
Commercialising art for corps was one of the last ways to exist as an artist in today's economy and get by. I fear the extinction of the profession will have a big impact on our cultural capital.
- raytopia 3y agoLuckily AI art will most likely be in the public domain so artists will probably always be involved but you'll become some editing cog in a machine trying to change a piece of ai art enough that it becomes copyrightable.
- rusk 3y agoMy guess is this will devalue art overall. That is indeed momentous it’s been a corner stone of modern culture for about 500 years. What does a world without art look like. Does a new form of “art” evolve that makes use of these seemingly omnipotent brushes?
- quenix 3y agoSadly, I feel it has already started to devalue art. I find myself unironically wondering whether some pieces are AI-generated on my feed. When I can't tell, I mentally devalue the image. I'm becoming more and more redpilled on the generative art stuff. The risk-benefit analysis checks out in favour of LLMs, but maybe art is something we can keep our Markov chains off of.
- reidjs 3y agoI think it will devalue visual art the same way photography has devalued photorealistic paintings It’s simply a new tool for artists to create art with. It will change art but I doubt it will destroy art. Like you said, a new form of art will evolve from it.
- finite_depth 3y ago[dead]
- admiral33 3y agoWe'll still have theater.
- dragonwriter 3y agoFilm/video already devalued theater and generative video is marching right behind generative imagery.
- criddell 3y ago> Film/video already devalued theater Is that true? Are there fewer live music shows, plays, live comedy, etc... than there were before cinema and television?
- addcommitpush 3y agoIn total, probably not but per capita?
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- rusk 3y agoLooking forward to the day I have a little stage in my living room where little androids act out scenes from Shakespeare, Beckett. Ha I bet Beckett never saw that one coming.
- minimaxir 3y agoAlternatively, it creates the oppertunity for research into different art styles, such as the ControlNet optical illusion spirals that went viral on Twitter/X last week: https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2023/09/dreamy-ai-generated-geometric-scenes-mesmerize-social-media-users/ https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2023/09/dream... Those spirals got backlash for being "too easy to do", but others have done more creative things with the same technology: https://www.reddit.com/r/StableDiffusion/comments/15wdoqa/been_trying_these_optical_illusions/ https://www.reddit.com/r/StableDiffusion/comments/15wdoqa/be... That's the importance of accessibility, and has happened all the time in art history (e.g. photography did not kill painting on a canvas)
- makeitdouble 3y agoGraphic arts have always been about the money, so I'd guess whatever happens on the technical side will have little effect on the art market in general. For instance the emergence of extremely good reproductions didn't affect the price of the original paintings. Same way the evolution of photoshop doesn't have much effect on the price of picture prints. Now stock photography could be impacted. But otherwise generative AI only opens the door to more picture production, and won't be put in competition to the traditional painting/prints market/direct artist support market. > What does a world without art look like. As an aside I always find it funny when 'art' is used as short form for 'pictures', especially in the world's context.
- rusk 3y ago> I always find it funny when 'art' is used as short form I think, given the context being an generative AI for images it should be fairly obvious what I’m talking about. I’m sure it’s only a matter of time before they do it for music, dancing, fighting and whatever else you care to tag with the term.
- jonas21 3y agoI dunno. The value of the type of art that is a "corner stone of modern culture" (i.e. the type of art you see in museums, etc.) doesn't seem to be related to how hard it is to produce. For example, Flag by Jasper Johns sold for $110M in 2010 [1]. The fact that almost anyone could make something like this (the subject matter is public domain, and the technique is within reach of anyone who has taken an art class) doesn't seem to have diminished its value. And as for all of the art you see in the everyday world, being able to design it more easily would likely lead to more of it, not less. Instead of seeing the same 20 things that they carry at IKEA over and over, you'd have custom artwork everywhere. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flag_(painting) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flag_(painting) EDIT: Added the last paragraph while you were replying.
- rusk 3y ago> i.e. the type of art that you see in museums, etc.) Nope. I mean the visual art we see all around us. If it’s trivial to generate it’ll be everywhere and nobody will value it. It will become a annoyance to people - so what fills that space then? Bare walls? Or will things go to a new level. Was kind of my line of thinking.
- esafak 3y agoIt becomes all about the artist; something that can not be replicated. What the art says about artist, what the artist intended, and the mere fact that a specific artist created it. Photography played a part in engendering this transition to "modern art" in the last century.
- criddell 3y agoI have paintings hanging in my house produced by artists I personally know. If anything, I think ubiquitous, throw away and infinitely reproducible digital art makes my paintings even more special to me (although none are worth all that much to start with).
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- jtmetcalfe 3y agoSeems like a problem for generative systems too though, fewer artists creating original artwork results in less input and variety to generate work from.
- astrange 3y agoImages aren't all created by "artists", and you don't need to train on images created by "artists" in order to produce something that could be called "art".
- candiddevmike 3y agoAll the AI generated images still make my head hurt when I look at them for any length of time. You start seeing oddities with shapes and lines, or some bizarre errant merge happened and my brain struggles to comprehend it. There's also a sort of "natural messiness" hand made images have that I don't think AI will ever capture.
- yunwal 3y agoI don’t really see how this has any impact outside of digital art. People are still buying paintings even though photos exist, and still buying sculptures even though cnc machines exist. I also think the output isn’t yet good enough to be usable without some human intervention (fixing hands, spot treatments, etc.)
- yummybear 3y agoThat’s just until AI combines with CNC to produce unique sculptures. Which won’t take long.
- suyash 3y agoThe impact has already happened, this will accelerate, paintings and even sculptures can be now bought dirt cheap online as it's being mass-produced by machines in China. Now fine art, graphic design etc are next to go.
- astrange 3y agoProbably being produced by factory workers, not machines. (It's like clothing - clothes are often cheap now, but every one of them was man-made.) And Chinese wages are rising, so it'll eventually be too low-level for them.
- axus 3y agoThe language on this page also suggests they want to put the prompt engineers out of a job.
- keiferski 3y agoThe fine art world, which is typically what people mean by "art", has basically nothing to do with generative AI and probably never will. It's an entirely different set of metrics. What you're talking about is illustration, which will indeed have a difficult time in the future.
- notRobot 3y ago> The fine art world, which is typically what people mean by "art" Maybe in your circle, but that's certainly not the case generally.
- keiferski 3y agoArt galleries? The art world? These are pretty universal terms and they refer to the system of museums, art fairs, galleries, etc. that have nothing to do with commercial illustrations.
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- staticman2 3y agoThe book illustrator is an artist who works in publishing, the art gallery painter is an artist who participates in the "fine art" world. I've never heard these terms used like you are using them.
- keiferski 3y agohttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Art_world https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Art_world See also: Art Forum. ArtNews. MoMa. The Met. Etc. I didn’t invent the term.
- staticman2 3y ago"Art world" is a term connected to "fine art" not "art" or "artists". That's where we disagree.
- flir 3y agoIn the first (cherry-picked, as you say) example, the man's moustache is doubled, the telephone handset is in two places, and his sideburns are on sideways. It would be a terrible outcome if authorship and illustration are mostly reduced to editing and touching up errors in AI-generated statistically likely art. (Although oddly, for programming, I'm really looking forward to that outcome).
- JimDabell 3y ago> I fear it will become pretty much impossible to make any sort of living off art in the next decade. Software developers have been having technology completely eat their work out from under them since the dawn of the industry. But jobs aren’t being lost over it; there’s more demand for software developers than ever. When software advancements reduce the work needed to produce output, the world has moved on by taking that as the new baseline which software developers build upon and demanding more software to be built with bigger and better features. Back when I first started working, it was somebody’s entire job to take pages and pages of content and transcribe them into HTML manually so that they could be published on a website. People used to do that all day, every day. Then CMSs came along and completely eliminated that work. Now sure, if a developer decided that all they wanted to do was write static HTML and refused to adapt their skills, they would be out of a job. But we all used the new technology to build more dynamic websites that provided more value. The new technology didn’t take away our jobs, it provided an opportunity to do a better job. It’s the same with this. These aren’t tools to replace artists – these are tools artists can use to do more and better work. These aren’t tools that will reduce demand – when everybody can get on-demand, totally custom artwork, people will want more of it, not less.
- mitthrowaway2 3y agoThis certainly seems to reduce how much experience and study an artist needs to have in order to produce art. And I think it's likely to reduce how much the viewer values the product as well. Automation does not always increase demand for the jobs being automated. Tractors didn't create more demand for oxen than ever.
- imchillyb 3y agoThe automation of tractors over manual plowing didn’t replace the Oxen, but the people driving them. Farm automation allowed a single man to plow many fields in the time one field would have taken. Automation allows one person to accomplish more with less. Tractors didn’t reduce the demand for product, but increased it many fold. Automation increases demand; every time.
- dom96 3y agoUntil we see successful video games/movies/tv shows built using 100% generative art I will remain sceptical that this will happen. What's more likely is that generative AI art will be its own category like digital art, where creative folks will use their creativity to create amazing works of art with the help of generative AI. After all, it takes creativity to know what to generate. You can't ask the AI to make you a whole movie or set of video game levels.
- skeaker 3y ago100% might be a high bar for just skepticism. If there was something massively successful that was even 50 or 60% AI (and the novelty of AI wasn't the sole reason for its success), I think I would be firmly convinced.
- suyash 3y agoArtists would have to find creative ways to separate themselves from AI-generated art. Also, it would be nice if there was something akin to a watermark that was perhaps invisible but upon inspection using a certain tool will reveal if it was created using the Generative AI model (similar to how real currency can be inspected and differentiated from fake currency notes)
- vinckr 3y agoArtist don't create art to make a living, but to experience the joy of creation. Making a living from art is something that the majority of artists even before GenAI did not reach. I agree that it will change things a lot, but fearing the "exctinction of art" is a bit dramatic IMO.
- suyash 3y agoI think you're defining a very particular type of 'artists', if you broaden the definition then think of graphic designers or concept artists, now thier job has been completely automated.
- dagw 3y agoif you broaden the definition then think of graphic designers or concept artists, now thier job has been completely automated. Sure, but will that have an effect on art? Most artists I know have day jobs completely unconnected to their art. Even the ones that draw stuff for a living don't consider that drawing their art. After spending all week working in the "drawing factory" they spend their weekends working on their 'real art'. The only argument I can see is that fewer people will be willing to really learn the craft of drawing/illustration etc. if the chance of getting a day job doing that diminishes greatly.
- labrador 3y agoI've heard more than once an artist say doing art is the only way to keep themselves from committing suicide. Artists gonna do art. Another example would be someone who loves to garden. If a gardening robot was invented those people would still garden themselves. Generative AI allows people without mechanical skill to do art, by iteratively interacting until the AI gets it just right for them, so in that sense generative AI opens up art to many more people. As for making money from art, I believe we're going to have to implement some sort of universal basic income. I currently don't have to work because I collect social security, so I pursue my hobbies the way most other people on UBI will do.
- throw__away7391 3y agoThis is going to open new doors for future artists, at least in the near term. I can easily imagine a future where a single dedicated individual or at least a very small independent team can make a full-length movie without leaving their apartment on a tribal budget that rivals a big Hollywood production costing hundreds of mullions to produce today. Right now you've got the writers striking, worried that the studios are going to replace them with AI, I think this is totally backwards, it's the studios who should be worried because the barriers to entry that protect them today are about to come crashing down. I am already seeing a few people make short films using these tools. Right now anything "AI generated" has a certain novelty factor, like back in the day when 3D CGI was new and we were all rendering chrome 3d spheres and shiny red cubes and cylinders on black and white checkerboards, this phase is going to pass soon enough. Perhaps that surreal Midjourney glow will be part of 20's nostalgia in the decades to come. There's a whole new set of skills a new generation of artists are going to master and do things largely unimaginable a year or two ago. They're going to make art that expresses their own perspectives and ideas and not just what's currently allowed by the current consensus, just as the artists before them did.
- sho_hn 3y ago> I can easily imagine a future where a single dedicated individual or at least a very small independent team can make a full-length movie without leaving their apartment on a tribal budget that rivals a big Hollywood production costing hundreds of mullions to produce today. This is definitely exciting to contemplate, but it's still quite tricky for the economics: Right now, the fact that you need 4000 people to make a blockbuster movie limits the number of movies being made, giving each movie enough of an audience (potentially) to make their money back. Better tools will enable more awesome creatives to make content alone - but will there be enough eyeballs to consume that content, even if it's cheap to make?
- nvm0n2 3y agoWe went through this with YouTube. The answer is yes. There's more than enough demand for stories that the current movie industry isn't interested in telling to sustain millions of cottage-industry movie or TV shows producers.
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- beepbooptheory 3y agoWhy do we even want to contribute to a culture so austere and calculating and uncaring anyway? Like, kind of a chicken/egg situation. It is all just impetus to go and find the prior form of "art" we have had all along. Art need not be about the Artist and her Works, or about creating something for some kind of vague consumption. Art can be about collectivity and shared truths. Art used to be about speaking to God or whatever, and whoever actually placed the pieces of glass were very secondary. At my most optimistic, I feel like some turn like this (but probably more secular) is inevitable. People need to get stuff out, and if this pressure is not relieved by our current ideas of labor and such, it will find a way nonetheless like water through stone. http://web.mit.edu/allanmc/www/benjamin.pdf http://web.mit.edu/allanmc/www/benjamin.pdf
- sys32768 3y agoIt might increase the preciousness of art made with physical media. Such real art will be seen as the real deal, handcrafted, etc. I think the market for affordable prints and copies will definitely suffer, because I can create prints of Midjourney art that looks as good as anything I see in our small local galleries and gift shops.
- orly01 3y agoFor now, all we know is this technology replaces the human capacity of drawing with good technique what a human wanted to be drawn. I think the relevant part of art is not the ability of generating an image, but to put thought on what you want to be there.
- dgunay 3y agoThere's still a significant lag time before uncensored generative AI catches up with this. So gracious of OpenAI to keep porn artists employed a little longer with all their moralizing.