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Another reason why AI makes me sad: take for example images. There is really no reason anymore to look at any posted art, image or article illustration, since,

• the-smug-one 3y ago
  Artists that I know work in the way of exploring and learning about a subject matter and creating art relating to it. When I see this kind of art, and talk to the artists, I get the sense of exploring the subject and learning with them. A lot of art isn't this, it simply exists for much more plain purposes, and that type of art seems to be what AI is able to generate. I feel disgust towards the idea that people will be able to create their own art using AI, as the current state of the art only allows for quite shallow creations. I'm not saying it's wrong, but I am disgusted.
• vidarh 3y ago
  None of what you describe has ever been my reasons for looking at an image, and yet I immensely enjoy looking at images.
  • masswerk 3y ago
    So what is it that you enjoy, when looking at a certain image (especially, when it comes to this particular image, as compared to any other representation of the same subject matter), if not the artistic choices? A weighted average? I'm skeptical…
    • vidarh 3y ago
      What it looks like. Whether the image itself appeals to me or moves me Whether those are "artistic choices" or random chance or a set of heuristics does not affect my enjoyment. It does not mean I don't find knowing about the choices of an artist or their process interesting at times, but for the vast majority of art I see I have idea about them. They are separate to my enjoyment of a given image. I don't know why you are skeptical - to me the notion that anything but the image itself should be necessary for me to enjoy it is a bizarre notion and I suspect it would be for a whole lot of people. Most people would not be able to name whomever created the vast majority of art they've seen, nor name the style, and do not spend time thinking about either.
    • BugsJustFindMe 3y ago
      > So what is it that you enjoy, when looking at a certain image (especially, when it comes to this particular image, as compared to any other representation of the same subject matter), if not the artistic choices? Things can be visually interesting without intent or artistic meaning. Even if you've never stared into a fire, surely would agree that many people do it? Or the ocean? Or hills covered in snow? Or trees? Or other people having lunch? Or a pretty face? People have gazed contentedly at things that are just pretty without any worry about "artistic choices" since people have existed.
      • masswerk 3y ago
        I'd argue, there's a difference between media and the world as-is. Media are crucially a projection, transposing an impression as an expression into another space, implying a difference in these two spaces and their respective dimensionality. This is, what makes media interesting to us. All what is implied in this: human experience, narrative strategies, focus, depth, texture, skill, choices, etc. Otherwise, we're just immersing in the world as-is, enjoying ourselves and our own choices. But, for art as an act of communication, this doesn't work. It even doesn't work for media, which is why immersive media, like 3D TV, regularly fail: it simply misses the media part.
        • vidarh 3y ago
  • TeMPOraL 3y ago
    Do you like procedurally generated content in games? Or do you quickly find it boring and empty, devoid of soul? I thought about it, and while part of my overall dislike of procgen in games comes from it being lazy and repetitive (too easy to spot the patterns), another part comes just from realizing there's nothing behind it. No mind, no plan, just RNG that I can keep rolling to get variations of the same theme. (There's also a sense of loneliness - when everyone is consuming unique content, it stops being a topic of conversation, because there's no shared experience anymore.)
    • vidarh 3y ago
      My issue with procedurally generated content is that it is often a replacement for effort, and so the problem is not lack of a mind behind it, but as you note that it is often lazy and repetitive, and so simply not good. Humans can be lazy and make repetitive crap too, and when they do I'll consider it just as crap whether or not their underlying ideas were amazing.
      • asadotzler 3y ago
        Humans may be lazy and produce crap, but AI is lazy and produces crap. See the difference?
        • vidarh 3y ago
          No, I don't agree that's a meaningful difference.
          • asadotzler 3y ago
            unable to discern a difference between "may be" and "is", perhaps you missed that day of school?
        • Towaway69 3y ago
          And who described, designed and built AI algorithms? See the connection? /s
  • PH95VuimJjqBqy 3y ago
    lmao, so glad to see this comment. I was about to post that not all of us are art snobs but your post captures the idea succinctly.
    • vidarh 3y ago
      I used to get angry at my Norwegian teacher when we were forced to analyze poems, because I like writing poems but never once felt compelled to insert the kind of forced symbolism he kept insisting we rip apart and shred and murder poetry to identify. Because it wasn't what I wrote or read poems for. Sometimes I'd even seek out a certain translation of a work because I enjoyed the beauty of the choice of word of the translator more than the authors underlying ideas. (I've never gotten through the original of Whitman's Leaves of Grass, because I find it trite, but there's a particular Norwegian translation I loved - the authors intent was identical, but one presentation of it was beautiful to me in ways the other has never been because of the patterns of words rather than meaning) Whether or not that intent or symbolism was there in a given poem, I found the process inherently destructive for my enjoyment of those poems, and I utterly detested the process because it felt like violence. The one time I wrote a poem with a message was as a task in his class, and it was a sharp denunciation of the analysis of poetry. No analysis was necessary - the intent was brutally apparent and quite rudely expressed. It is also the only poem of mine I've performed in 'public', which was a mistake of him, because it's perhaps the one thing that I have written that has met with the most universal approval among those who heard it, and it hardly improved the attitude towards the analysis of poetry. I still find pulling art apart to often be brutally destructive and occasionally insulting in it's often shallow insistence of knowing intent that usually is without actual evidence and mired in dogma. I don't mind people finding meaning in knowing more about how it was created when the creator of a piece of art wants that context to be known or part of the work, but I feel very strongly about assuming intent even for human art, because to me at least, for what I wrote, my intent usually was to write without any deeper meaning or symbolism, to evoke emotion. For me, for what I wrote, picking it apart ruins that on every level in ways people rarely are able to undo for themselves. It's like trying to reassemble a cadaver. People can find their own meaning in anything, and make their own choices, but so much art snobbery revolves around that assignation of a dogmatic interpretation of intent as "correct" and objective that often feels outright disrespectful to assume to me.
• eightysixfour 3y ago
  This is like a painter lamenting the invention of the camera because it takes away their ability to enjoy realist paintings. Now we laud photographer’s choices and denigrate the ones made by folks producing AI images. DALL-E is the disposable camera of AI images. There are plenty of artists working with more complex tool chains that take lots of effort and energy to create, and form their own type of AI art.
  • skepticATX 3y ago
    Photography still takes a ton of skill though. It's still ultimately a human creation. AI art is the antithesis of this.
    • MiiMe19 3y ago
      I think that if photography takes skill compared to painting, then AI art takes skill compared to photography. Just different skills.
    • vidarh 3y ago
      Like with photography, you can put in zero effort, or you can spend hours, days, weeks tweaking details. Some people just churn out images they happen to like from low-effort prompts, some people fine-tune their own models to get just the look they want.
    • eightysixfour 3y ago
      This is what painters said about photographers. Low quality photography is not elevated to the status of art. Low quality AI generations are not elevated to the status of art. The actual art will be made by people with something to say or show and it will take energy and effort - it won’t be made by typing your idea into DALL-E, it’ll happen with complex workflows on fine-tuned models. It is just another tool with different strengths, weaknesses, and constraints.
      • skepticATX 3y ago
        > it won’t be made by typing your idea into DALL-E, it’ll happen with complex workflows on fine-tuned models. I'm not convinced that this is what will happen long-term, but if it is, I'd completely agree that it's a new art form.
• gdubs 3y ago
  This seems highly subjective. I'm DEEP in the AI Art space and yet I still love looking at traditional art, photography posts on instagram. This is like saying that post-photography there was no reason to look at paintings anymore. And while the camera certainly disrupted art, it also led to a burst of creativity and gave us Picasso and Pollock.
  • masswerk 3y ago
    I'd argue, AI art occupies the negative space of abstract expressionism and informal painting. It has more or less catapulted us back in time, before there was photography and subjective impression and expression became the actual subject. Even more so, in lack of a projecting author, in who's projection we may conversely project ourselves, thus constructing a collaborative work of art, it crucially lacks any transcendent qualities as the author of the prompt lacks any finer control over an output, which is merely a weighted average.
• skepticATX 3y ago
  Agreed. I think that the concern about disinformation stemming from AI images/video misses the bigger picture. Humanity will adapt to these new technologies. We'll begin to trust what we see less and less. Which will prevent us from being fooled, but we also lose a massive part of the human experience in the process. Soon the days of being able to view a photograph, a video, artwork, and appreciate it as human ability at its pinnacle will be gone.
• nusl 3y ago
  I think it depends greatly on a person’s intentions when viewing an image, or their expectations. When I look at stock images I couldn’t give a damn. When I’m looking for art for my wall or desktop wallpaper I may give more of a damn. When I’m looking for art as a gift I will give even more of a damn. For the vast majority of applications I think AI “art” is “good enough” but this is the part that makes me really sad and conflicted. I don’t know a way forward for most artists or folk that create “general” images.
• amelius 3y ago
  Well, I get your point, but through prompting there are still a lot of choices that can be made by an artist using AI, even in an iterative way. On top of that, real artists will often find that they surprise themselves, and those surprises will drive the eventual creation. So this is a similar process, except it goes through AI instead of the unconscious part of the brain of a real artist.
• dylan604 3y ago
  [dead]
• douglaswlance 3y ago
  The image is the image. The curtains are blue because the curtains are blue.
• jetrink 3y ago
  I think that's 99% true right now, but it's not something that will be true forever. Almost all AI images that you see today are the result of a person typing a description into a prompt and getting an image back. If you're lucky, the person played with the prompt a bit until they got something that more closely matched their intention. However, there are tons of ways to integrate AI into a creative process in ways that allow an artist to iterate on an image and to be intentional about composition, color, style, and so on. Currently, it's only highly technical people who are able to do this, so the result is a lot of stuff that is technically impressive, but of low artistic value. (Quite similar to the output of the stereotypical camera nerd who has the latest camera and has its specs memorized, but takes uninteresting photos.) Eventually, these tools will find their way into the hands of artists and they will use it to make art. I believe that when thinking about AI art, it's helpful to keep photography in mind as a source of analogies. For instance, both give anyone the ability to create images easily. Both gave existing artists heart attacks and were dismissed because they didn't require artistic training to use. Both resulted in a flood of images being created without thought or effort. The main difference is that we skipped straight to the smartphone camera age with AI.
• gosub100 3y ago
  AI is not only a threat to generation of art, but also to consumption. For decades now, hollywood movies have been tested to "focus groups" to decide which way the stories should go to maximize profits. with AI, you can train it to maximize "engagement" to "discover trends". This could end up affecting even traditional artists. It could Hollywood-ize other forms of art.
• Ferret7446 3y ago
  > There is really no reason anymore to look at any posted art, image or article illustration Given the demand for AI art, it's safe to say that most people disagree. Personally, I like looking at pretty pictures. Also realize that death of the author was proposed many decades ago.
  • masswerk 3y ago
    Well, there's nothing new in this per se, text theory suggested a quasi autonomous "weaving" of texts and imaginary content some 60+ years ago. (Well, it's all about semantic fields and the implications were well known. – BTW, Neal Stephenson wrote an hilarious parody on this as an academic mainstream phenomenon in his Cryptonomicon, look up "Text at War".) But there was still some agency and some effort involved, maybe even reputation, some capital, which served as regulating factors. Now it feels more like marketing blurb without a product and no careers to be pursued behind this. Also, crucially, those representing the demand for AI art are not those who are meant to consume it. It's still too soon for any systemic feedback, other than economic factors and incentives.
  • asadotzler 3y ago
    I've looked at thousands of images created by people twiddling the rudimentary knobs on generative AI tools and it is universally garbage, often trumped by assembly line produced motel paintings. As someone with 5 years studying art and architecture in school, and 30 years of participating in art post school, I feel quite comfortable sharing that review.