7 ms·

Artificial Intelligence Cheapens the Artistic Imagination (2023)

37 points by 23B1 2y ago

puppycodes 2y ago
I'm so tired of this argument, people think art is a zero sum game, its not. It's like saying photographs cheapens the art of paintings... they are just different. Effort does not equal quality. Cry me a river.
- underlogic 2y ago
  It's totally zero sum. AI art is far better. Where artists had starving wages they'll soon get nothing. Same for actors and musicians and well everyone else. But the starving artists are somewhat unique. They're vocal because they've had a preview of a profession where you either are the best at what you do or broke for life. That's our future. I want my meals cooked by cheap hygienic ultrafast robots with no wage. Human made food can be a once a month novelty, if that. Every product, service and job will fall to AI in the next decade. History suggests this type of abrupt disruptive change quickly leads to a war. That's why those billionaires are digging bunkers.
  - deleted 2y ago
    [deleted]
- digitalsushi 2y ago
  Our concern for cost so eclipses our concern for quality that the horrible truth is we'll defer to infinite and ok to finite but great. I am not an artist and 1000 free wedding photos from my friends sounds much better than 30 wedding photos from a professional photographer. AI wrote my vows, my friends took the photos, and AI touched them up. I saved 2500 bucks and that photographer was free to upskill on their next industry. I have no idea if I am being facetious. I hate all of this, as much as I love it.
  - lexandstuff 2y ago
    The trade-off was that you had to burden your friends to take the photos, spend your own time collecting the images from them after your wedding, research AI services, and oversee how AI touches up your photos. You traded money for your and others time. Nothing wrong with that, but AI hasn't changed anything except the crowdsourced images look a little better, maybe? I would rather pay to get the 30 great photos ready to go - save me the hassle. Plus, a photographer will coordinate the key wedding photos with the various family and friend groups and will help find the ideal scene for shots. Of all jobs, wedding photographers are relatively safe from generative AI.
deleted 2y ago
[deleted]
jpollock 2y ago
Isn't this just "no true Scotsman?" [1] I don't see much difference in art created by an artist using an AI, art created by an artist using photoshop, and art created by an artist using red ochre. They are all using tools to express something. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/No_true_Scotsman https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/No_true_Scotsman
- dmd 2y ago
  If I ask some guy Leonardo to paint a portrait of me, am I the artist? Why not? My tool was Leonardo.
  - kian 2y ago
    Many artists in fact do exactly this -- they do not make the art themselves, but instead imagine and manage the 'art project' and delegate tasks to other artists that work for them. Leonardo (Da Vinci) in fact himself did this with much of the work required for his paintings, although the most crucial parts he left for himself.
    - dmd 2y ago
      Yes, that is why I chose Leonardo as an example.
      - shadowgovt 2y ago
        In that case, I think the answer to your hypothetical is "If you can convince people to call you that then yes." Didn't Warhol explore this conceptual space during his career?
  - deleted 2y ago
    [deleted]
  - digitalsushi 2y ago
    I support NASA going to Mars and pay taxes for them to try. I'm a Mars explorer. My tool is NASA. Yeah, I think I agree. Your boss gets credit for the things you invent. This is a reasonable position.
digitalsushi 2y ago
Humanity is going to have such a delightful crisis when live performance and physical presence become the only finite resource left we have to value. It can't scale, and like a big crunch at the end of heat death, a new universe will scatter. I doubt I'll live to see it but it's my most optimistic fantasy for the future. If it's delusional, let me at least keep it. After almost half a century of technology pushing a linear-scaled drip of dopamine-tied-neophilia, the recent bloom of ML has started to chew the flavor bare of this zebra gum and my jaw is concerned there is nothing left to experience if my effort remains at zero.
- bamboozled 2y ago
  This is why people who spend their whole weekend on their phone end up with anxiety, our lives are sand timers, we can see the end coming in the future, and when you spend your valuable time consuming bullshit, you look up at the clock, it says 6pm, and you wondered why you squandered your life, and think about what you might've done instead. This thought becomes too much to handle, then you look back down at the device so not to have to face the truth and on it goes until one day, reality bites.
myrryr 2y ago
> The makers of these tools promise they will boost efficiency and productivity by making workflows easier and faster. The problem with this message is that art is not about efficiency, productivity, or smooth workflows. Art is not about “executing” a task. Art is certainly not about the metrics of quantity, low cost, and speed that characterize industrialism. This here is really the crux of the issue. Making art as an expression of yourself isn't about these things. Making assets for games, etc is more about about the metrics of quantity, low cost, and speed that characterize industrialism Having the systems for the second, doesn't remove the first from existence.
- free_bip 2y ago
  Disagree. Unless you're going for absolute realism, making assets for a game is 100% under the normal realm of self expression based art. The piece being a part of a larger whole doesn't change that any more than an art piece being a part of a gallery does.
  - kulahan 2y ago
    He is referring to the difference between having corporate motivators for art vs. pure expressionism, not saying that there is zero artistic expression in corporate settings.
    - myrryr 2y ago
      Yep, that is exactly what I was going for.
  - Der_Einzige 2y ago
    Why yes, my self expression was to remove these exact 5000 triangles on my model so that it has the exact amount of fps that I expected in this cut scene on a computer with the following specs… Said no one ever. Most game assets are not “self expression based art”
- advael 2y ago
  Give an artist unlimited freedom and they will often produce drivel and sometimes produce masterpieces, even if with a few constraints they could have produced interesting work Give a corporation unlimited freedom and they will inevitably create dystopia, even if with a few constraints they could be a great boon to society
sircastor 2y ago
I find the premise that AI “cheapens art” to be spurious at best. There have been generations upon generations of crummy, unimaginative art. There have been decades of labor undercutting domestic artists. AI makes it easier for companies to be cheap, but that’s not new. They’ve been fighting to be cheap forever. How many artists of all stripes have been baited by “do it for the exposure” It doesn’t cheapen imagination. More people can express their ideas. I can’t help but think any company worth its salt is going to have artists on staff anyway - if for no other reason than to provide useful context for the art being generated.
blackeyeblitzar 2y ago
I disagree, as I’ve seen lots of genuinely artistic content that was at least partially generated by AI, that gave me certain emotions or made me see the artist’s vision. I do agree it doesn’t “feel” like it should be called “art” without a lot of effort put in or because the person generating it does not have to have the same technical skill. But where do we draw the line? Modern brushes and paints and papers make art easier - should we devalue that art because the artist did not create their own paints from scratch like they did hundreds of years ago?
mensetmanusman 2y ago
A glimpse of the future of ai as a tool for art are absurd songs about drinking gasoline: https://youtu.be/tC7bPMj5Q5Y https://youtu.be/tC7bPMj5Q5Y Or Kanye’s: https://youtu.be/GQEcxrY0CWA https://youtu.be/GQEcxrY0CWA
kevin_thibedeau 2y ago
Photography made the same disruption to periodical illustrators in the 19th century.
pclmulqdq 2y ago
If your "art" is actually threatened by AI, I question whether you are doing art at all. Art is not going anywhere. AI will be another tool in the toolbox, but artistry and artistic sensibility is here to stay. AI tools can create pictures, but actually creating art is still a human endeavor. From orchestras to video games, AI is going to change the way that art is done (and it already has), but the artists are not going away.
- digitalsushi 2y ago
  If 'the artists are not going away' involves either paying the artists less or reducing the number of artists or the meaning of being an artist being redefined I would not immediately agree. ... but the third one is doing a lot of lifting.
  - pclmulqdq 2y ago
    I think you will find that neither will be the case. There have always been a vanishingly small number of artists who can make money on art, and that pool (and their value) will not be decreasing. Much of that pool is doing live performance art, like dancers and musicians, and when Napster and Spotify came to "destroy" the musician by giving everyone infinite reach, what actually happened was that more people succeeded as professionals. The photograph was also a tremendously good thing for visual artists, bringing in the impressionist era and opening up a whole new field of art in itself. As to the concept of changing the nature of the work of the "artist" - I can't think of an artist whose work wasn't changed by the technology of the time. From Prussian blue to the electric guitar, artists are usually made great by showing the new possibilities of the new technology of the age.
- minimaxir 2y ago
  There's some nuance here. Industries such as stock photography and audiobook narration are indeed artistic forms but can mostly be replaced with AI equivalents.
  - pclmulqdq 2y ago
lolinder 2y ago
> As the photographic industry was the refuge of every would-be painter, every painter too ill-endowed or too lazy to complete his studies, this universal infatuation bore not only the mark of a blindness, an imbecility, but had also the air of a vengeance. I do not believe, or at least I do not wish to believe, in the absolute success of such a brutish conspiracy, in which, as in all others, one finds both fools and knaves; but I am convinced that the ill-applied developments of photography, like all other purely material developments of progress, have contributed much to the impoverishment of the French artistic genius, which is already so scarce. In vain may our modern Fatuity roar, belch forth all the rumbling wind of its rotund stomach, spew out all the undigested sophisms with which recent philosophy has stuffed it from top to bottom; it is nonetheless obvious that this industry, by invading the territories of art, has become art’s most mortal enemy, and that the confusion of their several functions prevents any of them from being properly fulfilled. Poetry and progress are like two ambitious men who hate one another with an instinctive hatred, and when they meet upon the same road, one of them has to give place. If photography is allowed to supplement art in some of its functions, it will soon have supplanted or corrupted it altogether, thanks to the stupidity of the multitude which is its natural ally. — Charles Baudelaire, On Photography, 1859 https://www.csus.edu/indiv/o/obriene/art109/readings/11%20baudelaire%20photography.htm https://www.csus.edu/indiv/o/obriene/art109/readings/11%20ba...
- jaggederest 2y ago
  I recall a similar statement attributed to Socrates, something about how writing was making people's memory worse.
- CuriouslyC 2y ago
  You don't even have to go that far back, illustrators and "artists" were griping about photoshop in the early 90s.
jazzyjackson 2y ago
You think the Bay gon let you disrespect Pac?
Nevermark 2y ago
> Human creativity and the good it offers to society cannot be replicated by a machine. No matter how advanced AI systems become, it is not likely that they will ever be able to think like a person. The story of computers since their inception has been a series of statements of this form being proven wrong. Up until not very long ago telling a random person you worked in AI reliably produced a very skeptic response or a look of disbelief. (In my experience.) We are naturally human centric in our thinking. But the rest of this century is going to require we face & work with reality, not against it. Making every advance in AI as usable for as many people as possible, and in service of their own initiatives, instead of replacing and channeling people is important. There is no reason “post-human” needs to mean the end of humans, as apposed to the future of humans. Unless we keep settling for tech that dehumanizes us. In which case, we bifurcate and the human race suffers from a very “hard landing”. Ethics, positive sums, transparency, on ramps, that all means more now than it ever has.
- bamboozled 2y ago
  If you think about how we've handled climate change, then we're fucked, because what I'm reading from you is it's going to take. 1) Co-ordination on a massive scale. 2) Honesty and integrity on all political fronts, including between hostile nations. 3) Uncompromising forward thinking and planning. Yes I know I'm negative, but people who expect some type of solution to come in the form of organization, are deluded IMO. The only saving grace for me is that we lack a lot of imagination about what the future will actually look like and so the AI takeover scenarios, and worthless humans hypothesis are not really what happens, we don't really know what will happen.
  - bufferoverflow 2y ago
    No. If things get really bad, pretty much everyone will want to fix them. And as far as temperatures go, it's not even that expensive to fix - block/reflect some of the sun at scale. Cover some deserts in cheap mirror material is probably the cheapest way to do this. USA alone can afford to do that. The expensive part is taking CO2 out of the atmosphere. But if the temperatures are back to normal (whatever "normal" we choose), then CO2 is less of an issue.
BoredPositron 2y ago
In Germany, there is the term "Gebrauchsgrafik." It refers to visualizations of products or services. These works typically lack artistic value and are often only visually aligned with the zeitgeist. Think of your bog-standard low effort advertising or IKEA instructions, generative AI is more than suitable for that. Not everything is or has to be considered art.
- xyzzy123 2y ago
  Low effort advertising sure. Diagrams I've had no luck with personally. With current models it's been a very frustrating process to even try. I can generate stuff with maybe one or two key ideas, but instructions are ignored as you try to incorporate more details. There also aren't really any affordances yet for dimensions. Perhaps styling / editing from sketches fixes this, I would be interested to hear from anyone who has managed to get a useful, Ikea style diagram out of gen ai. To me it feels we are a long way from AI being able to produce useful minimalist (i.e, omitting un-necessary detail) diagrams at better than a surface level of stylistic mimicry. Producing useful functional diagrams entails some understanding of the physical components and assembly process, along with some model of how people think and what information they need at what step to minimise confusion. Naturally a lot of this information is embedded in the design of the assembly itself and perhaps the big picture can all be "prompted in" but it's not a domain where "bullshitting it" works well.
  - BoredPositron 2y ago
    We work with flux, custom loras and controlnet and it's working exceptionally well. Using only prompts as conditioning is also not the way to go for higher complex tasks. It's day and night compared to dall-e,imagen, sd1.5 or sdxl.
WheelsAtLarge 2y ago
It cheapens humans, period. In the coming years, AI will be good enough to replace X% of a human's productivity. It will be as cheap as duplicating a process in a computer somewhere. It may never get to 100% but it will get to a high level. How many human equivalents will we be able to buy for a buck? AI is not the human savior people wish it would be.
- eddd-ddde 2y ago
  Everything that you wrote reads to me as "human savior". The issue is capitalism. If we doubled productivity that should double quality of life. The fact that they convinced us it doesn't is the issue.
  - bufferoverflow 2y ago
    Our quality of life more than doubled compared to ~50 years ago. We have powerful computers with amazing screens, constantly connected to a global network that allows you to talk to pretty much anyone on the planet, with video. That allows you to search for all kinds of information near-instantly that previously could take weeks or months of digging through libraries or newspaper archives. Computers that translate in near real time. We have medicine that solved so many diseases, and is so far ahead of what we had before. We have robots that do all kinds of boring and annoying and dangerous tasks. I have two robots cleaning and mopping my floors at home. We have whole factories that are mostly run by robot labor. We have freaking GPS! Capitalism is not the issue. It's infinitely better than any other system, which most of the time steals labor, forces labor. I grew up in USSR, I know.
- advael 2y ago
  I think this line of thinking is what happens when economies are allowed to calcify by consolidation of power in the hands of too few. I think the degree to which current systems are actually meaningfully transformative is greatly overstated by the tech industry. However, usually a transformative technology changes how economic distribution works. For example, even very wealthy households no longer employ as many human servants, because many of the tasks they once used human labor for are now done by household appliances. If the effect of "AI" is to cheapen human labor in its entirety, then a working economy will simply no longer center around labor, because the purpose of a working economy is to support the activities of humans by coordinating the distribution of resources. The likely alternative to the economy rearranging itself this way isn't most humans simply accepting being deprived of resources, but instead a breakdown of the cooperation necessary for most technology we have to continue functioning, as even if all the necessary infrastructure could run itself, it would also have to defend itself against defectors. Maybe it'll be effective at doing so, which probably means wiping out most humans. Of course, global-scale conflict could also do that, so it seems preferable to redistribute resources
j45 2y ago
LLMs as AI are sparking this conversation, there are articles outlining similar positions against Photoshop when it first came out. https://www.arkansasmomentos.com/burning-with-desire/2017/4/22/photoshop-now-what-1991 https://www.arkansasmomentos.com/burning-with-desire/2017/4/... A counterpoint to offer to this position beyond the legitimate concerns a new technology like this is having... if it was decided to re-imagine shooting the first 3 Star Wars films created, we probably would use today's sci-fi abilities. Of course, this doesn't cover the gamut of artistic skills and abilities. I'm hoping this means if it makes average people into a designer or programmer, a designer or programmer with AI will be 10-20x as effective. Learning, reskilling, upskilling, may be a reality in more areas. The question does move towards agency, and who is driving the content creation - experienced artists, designers, etc seem best positioned to describe creative descriptions and explore artistic imagination in these new ways. Human created art may be worth even more too. English is the new programming language, and those people who spent many years learning to describe and discuss nuanced things like art, and the creation of it, are probably better positioned than most.
ilaksh 2y ago
There is a real concern rapidly developing for artists just like there is for all types of human labor. That is valid. But the idea that AI necessarily reduces the level of art produced by artists seems to be a false conclusion. AI art DOES make it harder for artists to rest on pretension. But if the actual product of the artist matters, then it should make it easier to create works that are both more aesthetically pleasing AND more conceptual and relevant to society. The more substance there is to the art, the easier this is to see. The AI can help flesh out the details while the artist focuses on the high level concepts and experience they are trying to communicate. Like all automation, it does make classist viewpoints weaker. This article seems to be coming from that standpoint.
11thEarlOfMar 2y ago
Generative AI is an artistic medium. Just as acrylic, marble and the cello.
pzo 2y ago
Sadly for many artists the AI is/will be better than the average artist. I compare it to elite football players. "FIFA estimated that there were 123,694 professional soccer players worldwide." [0]. How many are really elite football players? Probably less than 2200 [22 (11 field + 11 outfield players) * 100 (top countries)]. Top 10% artists probably will get very well paid job but the rest will either get fired or salaries reduced or stagnant. [0] - https://www.statista.com/statistics/1283927/number-pro-soccer-players-by-country/ https://www.statista.com/statistics/1283927/number-pro-socce...
- 23B1 2y ago
  Better how? Art isn't measured in touchdowns.
  - pzo 2y ago
    Better in being good enough to be hired for the job and being paid.
    - 23B1 2y ago
      Commercial artist, maybe. Real artists, nah. I'm aware the difference between those two things is mucky, but 'real' art is exclusively a human-to-human communication. You can use AI to augment your work for sure, but even then it won't carry as much emotional weight (read: value) as Guernica or the Ecstasy of Santa Teresa.
1vuio0pswjnm7 2y ago
(2023)
deleted 2y ago
[deleted]

37 points by 23B1 2y ago

I'm so tired of this argument, people think art is a zero sum game, its not. It's like saying photographs cheapens the art of paintings... they are just different. Effort does not equal quality. Cry me a river.

underlogic 2y ago
It's totally zero sum. AI art is far better. Where artists had starving wages they'll soon get nothing. Same for actors and musicians and well everyone else. But the starving artists are somewhat unique. They're vocal because they've had a preview of a profession where you either are the best at what you do or broke for life. That's our future. I want my meals cooked by cheap hygienic ultrafast robots with no wage. Human made food can be a once a month novelty, if that. Every product, service and job will fall to AI in the next decade. History suggests this type of abrupt disruptive change quickly leads to a war. That's why those billionaires are digging bunkers.
- deleted 2y ago
  [deleted]
digitalsushi 2y ago
Our concern for cost so eclipses our concern for quality that the horrible truth is we'll defer to infinite and ok to finite but great. I am not an artist and 1000 free wedding photos from my friends sounds much better than 30 wedding photos from a professional photographer. AI wrote my vows, my friends took the photos, and AI touched them up. I saved 2500 bucks and that photographer was free to upskill on their next industry. I have no idea if I am being facetious. I hate all of this, as much as I love it.
- lexandstuff 2y ago
  The trade-off was that you had to burden your friends to take the photos, spend your own time collecting the images from them after your wedding, research AI services, and oversee how AI touches up your photos. You traded money for your and others time. Nothing wrong with that, but AI hasn't changed anything except the crowdsourced images look a little better, maybe? I would rather pay to get the 30 great photos ready to go - save me the hassle. Plus, a photographer will coordinate the key wedding photos with the various family and friend groups and will help find the ideal scene for shots. Of all jobs, wedding photographers are relatively safe from generative AI.

deleted 2y ago

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jpollock 2y ago

Isn't this just "no true Scotsman?" [1] I don't see much difference in art created by an artist using an AI, art created by an artist using photoshop, and art created by an artist using red ochre. They are all using tools to express something. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/No_true_Scotsman https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/No_true_Scotsman

dmd 2y ago
If I ask some guy Leonardo to paint a portrait of me, am I the artist? Why not? My tool was Leonardo.
- kian 2y ago
  Many artists in fact do exactly this -- they do not make the art themselves, but instead imagine and manage the 'art project' and delegate tasks to other artists that work for them. Leonardo (Da Vinci) in fact himself did this with much of the work required for his paintings, although the most crucial parts he left for himself.
  - dmd 2y ago
    Yes, that is why I chose Leonardo as an example.
    - shadowgovt 2y ago
      In that case, I think the answer to your hypothetical is "If you can convince people to call you that then yes." Didn't Warhol explore this conceptual space during his career?
- deleted 2y ago
  [deleted]
- digitalsushi 2y ago
  I support NASA going to Mars and pay taxes for them to try. I'm a Mars explorer. My tool is NASA. Yeah, I think I agree. Your boss gets credit for the things you invent. This is a reasonable position.

digitalsushi 2y ago

Humanity is going to have such a delightful crisis when live performance and physical presence become the only finite resource left we have to value. It can't scale, and like a big crunch at the end of heat death, a new universe will scatter. I doubt I'll live to see it but it's my most optimistic fantasy for the future. If it's delusional, let me at least keep it. After almost half a century of technology pushing a linear-scaled drip of dopamine-tied-neophilia, the recent bloom of ML has started to chew the flavor bare of this zebra gum and my jaw is concerned there is nothing left to experience if my effort remains at zero.

bamboozled 2y ago
This is why people who spend their whole weekend on their phone end up with anxiety, our lives are sand timers, we can see the end coming in the future, and when you spend your valuable time consuming bullshit, you look up at the clock, it says 6pm, and you wondered why you squandered your life, and think about what you might've done instead. This thought becomes too much to handle, then you look back down at the device so not to have to face the truth and on it goes until one day, reality bites.

myrryr 2y ago

> The makers of these tools promise they will boost efficiency and productivity by making workflows easier and faster. The problem with this message is that art is not about efficiency, productivity, or smooth workflows. Art is not about “executing” a task. Art is certainly not about the metrics of quantity, low cost, and speed that characterize industrialism. This here is really the crux of the issue. Making art as an expression of yourself isn't about these things. Making assets for games, etc is more about about the metrics of quantity, low cost, and speed that characterize industrialism Having the systems for the second, doesn't remove the first from existence.

free_bip 2y ago
Disagree. Unless you're going for absolute realism, making assets for a game is 100% under the normal realm of self expression based art. The piece being a part of a larger whole doesn't change that any more than an art piece being a part of a gallery does.
- kulahan 2y ago
  He is referring to the difference between having corporate motivators for art vs. pure expressionism, not saying that there is zero artistic expression in corporate settings.
  - myrryr 2y ago
    Yep, that is exactly what I was going for.
- Der_Einzige 2y ago
  Why yes, my self expression was to remove these exact 5000 triangles on my model so that it has the exact amount of fps that I expected in this cut scene on a computer with the following specs… Said no one ever. Most game assets are not “self expression based art”
advael 2y ago
Give an artist unlimited freedom and they will often produce drivel and sometimes produce masterpieces, even if with a few constraints they could have produced interesting work Give a corporation unlimited freedom and they will inevitably create dystopia, even if with a few constraints they could be a great boon to society

sircastor 2y ago

I find the premise that AI “cheapens art” to be spurious at best. There have been generations upon generations of crummy, unimaginative art. There have been decades of labor undercutting domestic artists. AI makes it easier for companies to be cheap, but that’s not new. They’ve been fighting to be cheap forever. How many artists of all stripes have been baited by “do it for the exposure” It doesn’t cheapen imagination. More people can express their ideas. I can’t help but think any company worth its salt is going to have artists on staff anyway - if for no other reason than to provide useful context for the art being generated.

blackeyeblitzar 2y ago

I disagree, as I’ve seen lots of genuinely artistic content that was at least partially generated by AI, that gave me certain emotions or made me see the artist’s vision. I do agree it doesn’t “feel” like it should be called “art” without a lot of effort put in or because the person generating it does not have to have the same technical skill. But where do we draw the line? Modern brushes and paints and papers make art easier - should we devalue that art because the artist did not create their own paints from scratch like they did hundreds of years ago?

mensetmanusman 2y ago

A glimpse of the future of ai as a tool for art are absurd songs about drinking gasoline: https://youtu.be/tC7bPMj5Q5Y https://youtu.be/tC7bPMj5Q5Y Or Kanye’s: https://youtu.be/GQEcxrY0CWA https://youtu.be/GQEcxrY0CWA

kevin_thibedeau 2y ago

Photography made the same disruption to periodical illustrators in the 19th century.

pclmulqdq 2y ago

If your "art" is actually threatened by AI, I question whether you are doing art at all. Art is not going anywhere. AI will be another tool in the toolbox, but artistry and artistic sensibility is here to stay. AI tools can create pictures, but actually creating art is still a human endeavor. From orchestras to video games, AI is going to change the way that art is done (and it already has), but the artists are not going away.

digitalsushi 2y ago
If 'the artists are not going away' involves either paying the artists less or reducing the number of artists or the meaning of being an artist being redefined I would not immediately agree. ... but the third one is doing a lot of lifting.
- pclmulqdq 2y ago
  I think you will find that neither will be the case. There have always been a vanishingly small number of artists who can make money on art, and that pool (and their value) will not be decreasing. Much of that pool is doing live performance art, like dancers and musicians, and when Napster and Spotify came to "destroy" the musician by giving everyone infinite reach, what actually happened was that more people succeeded as professionals. The photograph was also a tremendously good thing for visual artists, bringing in the impressionist era and opening up a whole new field of art in itself. As to the concept of changing the nature of the work of the "artist" - I can't think of an artist whose work wasn't changed by the technology of the time. From Prussian blue to the electric guitar, artists are usually made great by showing the new possibilities of the new technology of the age.
minimaxir 2y ago
There's some nuance here. Industries such as stock photography and audiobook narration are indeed artistic forms but can mostly be replaced with AI equivalents.
- pclmulqdq 2y ago

lolinder 2y ago

> As the photographic industry was the refuge of every would-be painter, every painter too ill-endowed or too lazy to complete his studies, this universal infatuation bore not only the mark of a blindness, an imbecility, but had also the air of a vengeance. I do not believe, or at least I do not wish to believe, in the absolute success of such a brutish conspiracy, in which, as in all others, one finds both fools and knaves; but I am convinced that the ill-applied developments of photography, like all other purely material developments of progress, have contributed much to the impoverishment of the French artistic genius, which is already so scarce. In vain may our modern Fatuity roar, belch forth all the rumbling wind of its rotund stomach, spew out all the undigested sophisms with which recent philosophy has stuffed it from top to bottom; it is nonetheless obvious that this industry, by invading the territories of art, has become art’s most mortal enemy, and that the confusion of their several functions prevents any of them from being properly fulfilled. Poetry and progress are like two ambitious men who hate one another with an instinctive hatred, and when they meet upon the same road, one of them has to give place. If photography is allowed to supplement art in some of its functions, it will soon have supplanted or corrupted it altogether, thanks to the stupidity of the multitude which is its natural ally. — Charles Baudelaire, On Photography, 1859 https://www.csus.edu/indiv/o/obriene/art109/readings/11%20baudelaire%20photography.htm https://www.csus.edu/indiv/o/obriene/art109/readings/11%20ba...

jaggederest 2y ago
I recall a similar statement attributed to Socrates, something about how writing was making people's memory worse.
CuriouslyC 2y ago
You don't even have to go that far back, illustrators and "artists" were griping about photoshop in the early 90s.

jazzyjackson 2y ago

You think the Bay gon let you disrespect Pac?

Nevermark 2y ago

> Human creativity and the good it offers to society cannot be replicated by a machine. No matter how advanced AI systems become, it is not likely that they will ever be able to think like a person. The story of computers since their inception has been a series of statements of this form being proven wrong. Up until not very long ago telling a random person you worked in AI reliably produced a very skeptic response or a look of disbelief. (In my experience.) We are naturally human centric in our thinking. But the rest of this century is going to require we face & work with reality, not against it. Making every advance in AI as usable for as many people as possible, and in service of their own initiatives, instead of replacing and channeling people is important. There is no reason “post-human” needs to mean the end of humans, as apposed to the future of humans. Unless we keep settling for tech that dehumanizes us. In which case, we bifurcate and the human race suffers from a very “hard landing”. Ethics, positive sums, transparency, on ramps, that all means more now than it ever has.

bamboozled 2y ago
If you think about how we've handled climate change, then we're fucked, because what I'm reading from you is it's going to take. 1) Co-ordination on a massive scale. 2) Honesty and integrity on all political fronts, including between hostile nations. 3) Uncompromising forward thinking and planning. Yes I know I'm negative, but people who expect some type of solution to come in the form of organization, are deluded IMO. The only saving grace for me is that we lack a lot of imagination about what the future will actually look like and so the AI takeover scenarios, and worthless humans hypothesis are not really what happens, we don't really know what will happen.
- bufferoverflow 2y ago
  No. If things get really bad, pretty much everyone will want to fix them. And as far as temperatures go, it's not even that expensive to fix - block/reflect some of the sun at scale. Cover some deserts in cheap mirror material is probably the cheapest way to do this. USA alone can afford to do that. The expensive part is taking CO2 out of the atmosphere. But if the temperatures are back to normal (whatever "normal" we choose), then CO2 is less of an issue.

BoredPositron 2y ago

In Germany, there is the term "Gebrauchsgrafik." It refers to visualizations of products or services. These works typically lack artistic value and are often only visually aligned with the zeitgeist. Think of your bog-standard low effort advertising or IKEA instructions, generative AI is more than suitable for that. Not everything is or has to be considered art.

xyzzy123 2y ago
Low effort advertising sure. Diagrams I've had no luck with personally. With current models it's been a very frustrating process to even try. I can generate stuff with maybe one or two key ideas, but instructions are ignored as you try to incorporate more details. There also aren't really any affordances yet for dimensions. Perhaps styling / editing from sketches fixes this, I would be interested to hear from anyone who has managed to get a useful, Ikea style diagram out of gen ai. To me it feels we are a long way from AI being able to produce useful minimalist (i.e, omitting un-necessary detail) diagrams at better than a surface level of stylistic mimicry. Producing useful functional diagrams entails some understanding of the physical components and assembly process, along with some model of how people think and what information they need at what step to minimise confusion. Naturally a lot of this information is embedded in the design of the assembly itself and perhaps the big picture can all be "prompted in" but it's not a domain where "bullshitting it" works well.
- BoredPositron 2y ago
  We work with flux, custom loras and controlnet and it's working exceptionally well. Using only prompts as conditioning is also not the way to go for higher complex tasks. It's day and night compared to dall-e,imagen, sd1.5 or sdxl.

WheelsAtLarge 2y ago

It cheapens humans, period. In the coming years, AI will be good enough to replace X% of a human's productivity. It will be as cheap as duplicating a process in a computer somewhere. It may never get to 100% but it will get to a high level. How many human equivalents will we be able to buy for a buck? AI is not the human savior people wish it would be.

eddd-ddde 2y ago
Everything that you wrote reads to me as "human savior". The issue is capitalism. If we doubled productivity that should double quality of life. The fact that they convinced us it doesn't is the issue.
- bufferoverflow 2y ago
  Our quality of life more than doubled compared to ~50 years ago. We have powerful computers with amazing screens, constantly connected to a global network that allows you to talk to pretty much anyone on the planet, with video. That allows you to search for all kinds of information near-instantly that previously could take weeks or months of digging through libraries or newspaper archives. Computers that translate in near real time. We have medicine that solved so many diseases, and is so far ahead of what we had before. We have robots that do all kinds of boring and annoying and dangerous tasks. I have two robots cleaning and mopping my floors at home. We have whole factories that are mostly run by robot labor. We have freaking GPS! Capitalism is not the issue. It's infinitely better than any other system, which most of the time steals labor, forces labor. I grew up in USSR, I know.
advael 2y ago
I think this line of thinking is what happens when economies are allowed to calcify by consolidation of power in the hands of too few. I think the degree to which current systems are actually meaningfully transformative is greatly overstated by the tech industry. However, usually a transformative technology changes how economic distribution works. For example, even very wealthy households no longer employ as many human servants, because many of the tasks they once used human labor for are now done by household appliances. If the effect of "AI" is to cheapen human labor in its entirety, then a working economy will simply no longer center around labor, because the purpose of a working economy is to support the activities of humans by coordinating the distribution of resources. The likely alternative to the economy rearranging itself this way isn't most humans simply accepting being deprived of resources, but instead a breakdown of the cooperation necessary for most technology we have to continue functioning, as even if all the necessary infrastructure could run itself, it would also have to defend itself against defectors. Maybe it'll be effective at doing so, which probably means wiping out most humans. Of course, global-scale conflict could also do that, so it seems preferable to redistribute resources

j45 2y ago

LLMs as AI are sparking this conversation, there are articles outlining similar positions against Photoshop when it first came out. https://www.arkansasmomentos.com/burning-with-desire/2017/4/22/photoshop-now-what-1991 https://www.arkansasmomentos.com/burning-with-desire/2017/4/... A counterpoint to offer to this position beyond the legitimate concerns a new technology like this is having... if it was decided to re-imagine shooting the first 3 Star Wars films created, we probably would use today's sci-fi abilities. Of course, this doesn't cover the gamut of artistic skills and abilities. I'm hoping this means if it makes average people into a designer or programmer, a designer or programmer with AI will be 10-20x as effective. Learning, reskilling, upskilling, may be a reality in more areas. The question does move towards agency, and who is driving the content creation - experienced artists, designers, etc seem best positioned to describe creative descriptions and explore artistic imagination in these new ways. Human created art may be worth even more too. English is the new programming language, and those people who spent many years learning to describe and discuss nuanced things like art, and the creation of it, are probably better positioned than most.

ilaksh 2y ago

There is a real concern rapidly developing for artists just like there is for all types of human labor. That is valid. But the idea that AI necessarily reduces the level of art produced by artists seems to be a false conclusion. AI art DOES make it harder for artists to rest on pretension. But if the actual product of the artist matters, then it should make it easier to create works that are both more aesthetically pleasing AND more conceptual and relevant to society. The more substance there is to the art, the easier this is to see. The AI can help flesh out the details while the artist focuses on the high level concepts and experience they are trying to communicate. Like all automation, it does make classist viewpoints weaker. This article seems to be coming from that standpoint.

11thEarlOfMar 2y ago

Generative AI is an artistic medium. Just as acrylic, marble and the cello.

pzo 2y ago

Sadly for many artists the AI is/will be better than the average artist. I compare it to elite football players. "FIFA estimated that there were 123,694 professional soccer players worldwide." [0]. How many are really elite football players? Probably less than 2200 [22 (11 field + 11 outfield players) * 100 (top countries)]. Top 10% artists probably will get very well paid job but the rest will either get fired or salaries reduced or stagnant. [0] - https://www.statista.com/statistics/1283927/number-pro-soccer-players-by-country/ https://www.statista.com/statistics/1283927/number-pro-socce...

23B1 2y ago
Better how? Art isn't measured in touchdowns.
- pzo 2y ago
  Better in being good enough to be hired for the job and being paid.
  - 23B1 2y ago
    Commercial artist, maybe. Real artists, nah. I'm aware the difference between those two things is mucky, but 'real' art is exclusively a human-to-human communication. You can use AI to augment your work for sure, but even then it won't carry as much emotional weight (read: value) as Guernica or the Ecstasy of Santa Teresa.

1vuio0pswjnm7 2y ago

(2023)

deleted 2y ago

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