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IMO all of this will blow over in a few years and most artists will accept that "AI" is just another tool that one can use to create art. It took some time for

IMO all of this will blow over in a few years and most artists will accept that "AI" is just another tool that one can use to create art. It took some time for photography as well... edit: typo

dbrgn 3y ago
That's an interesting point. Retouching a photo after taking it used to be "manipulating reality", frowned upon by "real" photographers. Nowadays, postprocessing digital negatives and adding your own style to it is part of a normal photographer's workflow. (However, I think the negative feelings don't come from a discussion of "real vs fake" or "classical vs new", but mostly from the point of view that using artwork as training data is stealing. I don't agree with that view, but I think it's at the core of the argument.)
- jdiff 3y ago
  People have been doing post processing of photographs as long as photographs have existed.
  - dbrgn 3y ago
    Yes, but - at least in landscape photography - there was a divide between people using retouching to "fix" things (i.e. removing spots, making the colors more realistic, etc) and the people altering the style of the photo (e.g. by boosting or even shifting certain colors to achieve a certain look). The latter was viewed as fake by some people I knew. Today this is just part of your photography style.
  - dragonwriter 3y ago
    That doesn't mean there were purists arguing about it. Someone has to be doing it for the fight to exist.
vouaobrasil 3y ago
This is absolutely ridiculous and short-sighted. AI is a tool that is and always will make the creation of art less a matter of the expression of the human soul. What techies NEVER understand about art is this: that art is not just the end product for the artist but something they use to express THEMSELVES. UNLIKE other tools, AI makes creative decisions. No other tool has done this, and moreover, its primary purpose is to take away the reliance on artists. The ultimate aim of BIG TECH is to take away this reliance so that they can be the ultimate source of cheap art, just like cheap slave labour is the ultimate source of cheap and unsustainable clothing for most people. Therefore, AI will NEVER be a tool to create art like other tools. It is is a tool that will outcompete humans on a massive scale so that even if "normal human art" exists, it will never gain much traction or commercial viability. To be honest, AI is absolutely sickening and companies like Microsoft and OpenAI make me sick.
- dthul 3y ago
  That sounds like a very Luddite view. Why wouldn't artists be able to use AI selectively to automate "boring" tasks (such as filling the sky of an image with clouds) while still retaining overall artistic control?
  - vouaobrasil 3y ago
    I am a luddite and I agree with most luddite sentiments. Most of this generative AI is NOT about using AI for boring tasks, and have you ever even tried to draw clouds? Not easy. Everyone draws clouds differently, which you would know if you ever tried to draw anything. Moreover, AI as a societal phenomenon goes way beyond AI drawing clouds.
    - dthul 3y ago
      > which you would know if you ever tried to draw anything I know exactly how hard it is to draw anything because I tried a bunch of times, and failed. I for one am happy that I can now express my creative ideas, which I couldn't do before due to missing talent / practice.
Sol- 3y ago
Most professional artists will be unemployed and hobbyist artists using AI seems to be kind of against the point of creating art for the art of creation. But for one-click self-expression, AI tools will certainly come in handy.
- eMPee584 3y ago
  The dawn of the post-work age! C : .. nearly everyone will become unemployed five years from now (when AGI / humanoid robots hit mainstream adoption). The economical paradigm will have to change inevitably. Now it's on us to nudge it towards a nice and chill open source economy with open access infrastructure and cybersyn-like global federated resource stream coordination instead of the competitive vortex of death, madness & despair we have now.
  - Lacerda69 3y ago
    Mainstream media said the same thing about nuclear energy, steam engines, integrated circuits, and a dozen other technologies since the dawn of civilization. It never manifested though, and people still work and produce like they did for thousands of years. Humans are surprisingly adept at coming up with new kinds of work. IMO the bigger "risk" is that we will extinct ourselves in the next few hundred years, but that is a different discussion.
- Filligree 3y ago
  It kind of depends on the type of artist. I use it to illustrate my stories, for example, and I'd be upset if someone claimed my writing doesn't count as art- But I've spent well over a decade learning to write. I don't have any skill in drawing, and I don't earn any money from my writing. (...and last time I tried to hire an artist, they bit my head off when I offered an example of what I was after.) So I'll use AI art, because it's that or no art.
- Gormo 3y ago
  > hobbyist artists using AI seems to be kind of against the point of creating art for the art of creation How do you figure that?
lancesells 3y ago
I'm an artist and look at generative AI as a tool that's almost always going to produce content but not art. I refuse to use it from a moral standpoint but I also don't use any digital tools at all in the creation of my work. Even if I worked digitally I don't create art to produce pretty pictures as fast as possible. Typing in a prompt and fiddling with some things back and forth is just that.
- thot_experiment 3y ago
  This comment hurts me to my very core, I actually screamed when I read it. I'm in one of the most artistically productive periods of my life right now. I've been doing multiple notebook pages of gouache and india ink a day. I also have a homebuilt plotter that I've written an entire suite of software for. I've been doing 3D graphics and photomanipulation, I've been dabbling in video editing. AND I've been pushing what can be done with Stable Diffusion, and it's absolutely a tool to create art. The idea that "Typing in a prompt and fiddling with some things back and forth" is all there is to AI art is so fucking absurd. This is the "meme" I'm talking about. There SO much more to AI art from an artistic control perspective than the prompt, and not only that, there's so much we haven't even fucking invented yet which is clear from the rate of progress in the field. These reductive "it's not real art" are even worse than the "theft" moralizing. It's akin to saying photography isn't art because you just click a button. > I don't create art to produce pretty pictures as fast as possible. I create art because I like to make art, sometimes that means laboring over the placement of every line. Sometimes I need three hundred frames and there's only me and my GPU against the world. AI opens up possibilities that were completely unreachable before, just like everything else I'm able to do artistically with my computer.
  - lancesells 3y ago
    I'm happy you get something out of it and wish you the best. I do think it's built on theft and I do think it's a cold, lifeless medium. I think art is truth and the farther you get away from a human making something the farther you are away from the artist and feeling. A digital print will never feel as nice to me as a painting or a drawing. A handmade sculpture will always feel better to me than something produced with a mold or a 3D printer. We're all different and again, it's great if you like making art with AI. The world needs differences, otherwise it would be quite boring.

IMO all of this will blow over in a few years and most artists will accept that "AI" is just another tool that one can use to create art. It took some time for photography as well... edit: typo

dbrgn 3y ago

That's an interesting point. Retouching a photo after taking it used to be "manipulating reality", frowned upon by "real" photographers. Nowadays, postprocessing digital negatives and adding your own style to it is part of a normal photographer's workflow. (However, I think the negative feelings don't come from a discussion of "real vs fake" or "classical vs new", but mostly from the point of view that using artwork as training data is stealing. I don't agree with that view, but I think it's at the core of the argument.)

jdiff 3y ago
People have been doing post processing of photographs as long as photographs have existed.
- dbrgn 3y ago
  Yes, but - at least in landscape photography - there was a divide between people using retouching to "fix" things (i.e. removing spots, making the colors more realistic, etc) and the people altering the style of the photo (e.g. by boosting or even shifting certain colors to achieve a certain look). The latter was viewed as fake by some people I knew. Today this is just part of your photography style.
- dragonwriter 3y ago
  That doesn't mean there were purists arguing about it. Someone has to be doing it for the fight to exist.

vouaobrasil 3y ago

This is absolutely ridiculous and short-sighted. AI is a tool that is and always will make the creation of art less a matter of the expression of the human soul. What techies NEVER understand about art is this: that art is not just the end product for the artist but something they use to express THEMSELVES. UNLIKE other tools, AI makes creative decisions. No other tool has done this, and moreover, its primary purpose is to take away the reliance on artists. The ultimate aim of BIG TECH is to take away this reliance so that they can be the ultimate source of cheap art, just like cheap slave labour is the ultimate source of cheap and unsustainable clothing for most people. Therefore, AI will NEVER be a tool to create art like other tools. It is is a tool that will outcompete humans on a massive scale so that even if "normal human art" exists, it will never gain much traction or commercial viability. To be honest, AI is absolutely sickening and companies like Microsoft and OpenAI make me sick.

dthul 3y ago
That sounds like a very Luddite view. Why wouldn't artists be able to use AI selectively to automate "boring" tasks (such as filling the sky of an image with clouds) while still retaining overall artistic control?
- vouaobrasil 3y ago
  I am a luddite and I agree with most luddite sentiments. Most of this generative AI is NOT about using AI for boring tasks, and have you ever even tried to draw clouds? Not easy. Everyone draws clouds differently, which you would know if you ever tried to draw anything. Moreover, AI as a societal phenomenon goes way beyond AI drawing clouds.
  - dthul 3y ago
    > which you would know if you ever tried to draw anything I know exactly how hard it is to draw anything because I tried a bunch of times, and failed. I for one am happy that I can now express my creative ideas, which I couldn't do before due to missing talent / practice.

Sol- 3y ago

Most professional artists will be unemployed and hobbyist artists using AI seems to be kind of against the point of creating art for the art of creation. But for one-click self-expression, AI tools will certainly come in handy.

eMPee584 3y ago
The dawn of the post-work age! C : .. nearly everyone will become unemployed five years from now (when AGI / humanoid robots hit mainstream adoption). The economical paradigm will have to change inevitably. Now it's on us to nudge it towards a nice and chill open source economy with open access infrastructure and cybersyn-like global federated resource stream coordination instead of the competitive vortex of death, madness & despair we have now.
- Lacerda69 3y ago
  Mainstream media said the same thing about nuclear energy, steam engines, integrated circuits, and a dozen other technologies since the dawn of civilization. It never manifested though, and people still work and produce like they did for thousands of years. Humans are surprisingly adept at coming up with new kinds of work. IMO the bigger "risk" is that we will extinct ourselves in the next few hundred years, but that is a different discussion.
Filligree 3y ago
It kind of depends on the type of artist. I use it to illustrate my stories, for example, and I'd be upset if someone claimed my writing doesn't count as art- But I've spent well over a decade learning to write. I don't have any skill in drawing, and I don't earn any money from my writing. (...and last time I tried to hire an artist, they bit my head off when I offered an example of what I was after.) So I'll use AI art, because it's that or no art.
Gormo 3y ago
> hobbyist artists using AI seems to be kind of against the point of creating art for the art of creation How do you figure that?

lancesells 3y ago

I'm an artist and look at generative AI as a tool that's almost always going to produce content but not art. I refuse to use it from a moral standpoint but I also don't use any digital tools at all in the creation of my work. Even if I worked digitally I don't create art to produce pretty pictures as fast as possible. Typing in a prompt and fiddling with some things back and forth is just that.

thot_experiment 3y ago
This comment hurts me to my very core, I actually screamed when I read it. I'm in one of the most artistically productive periods of my life right now. I've been doing multiple notebook pages of gouache and india ink a day. I also have a homebuilt plotter that I've written an entire suite of software for. I've been doing 3D graphics and photomanipulation, I've been dabbling in video editing. AND I've been pushing what can be done with Stable Diffusion, and it's absolutely a tool to create art. The idea that "Typing in a prompt and fiddling with some things back and forth" is all there is to AI art is so fucking absurd. This is the "meme" I'm talking about. There SO much more to AI art from an artistic control perspective than the prompt, and not only that, there's so much we haven't even fucking invented yet which is clear from the rate of progress in the field. These reductive "it's not real art" are even worse than the "theft" moralizing. It's akin to saying photography isn't art because you just click a button. > I don't create art to produce pretty pictures as fast as possible. I create art because I like to make art, sometimes that means laboring over the placement of every line. Sometimes I need three hundred frames and there's only me and my GPU against the world. AI opens up possibilities that were completely unreachable before, just like everything else I'm able to do artistically with my computer.
- lancesells 3y ago
  I'm happy you get something out of it and wish you the best. I do think it's built on theft and I do think it's a cold, lifeless medium. I think art is truth and the farther you get away from a human making something the farther you are away from the artist and feeling. A digital print will never feel as nice to me as a painting or a drawing. A handmade sculpture will always feel better to me than something produced with a mold or a 3D printer. We're all different and again, it's great if you like making art with AI. The world needs differences, otherwise it would be quite boring.