5 ms·

[flagged]

ilaksh 2y ago
In this view the purpose of creating art is self-development? I suspect we could drill down into what you are trying to say for a whole thread but the result is just going to be a specification for pretension.
- 52-6F-62 2y ago
  In all views. It certainly isn't a checkbox. Why don’t you shelve the pretentious corporate rhetoric yourself and re-read what I’ve suggested. Get off the computer and pick up a pencil, or mound of clay, or whatever, and give it a few years of regular practice. Theres nothing pretentious about that. It will do everything and I will need to say nothing.
  - ilaksh 2y ago
    "In all views". "It will do everything and I will need to say nothing". Those are the pretentious parts of your reply. It's just not true that everyone feels that practicing art is the main point. Sure, it can be developmental for an individual.
    - text0404 2y ago
      > It's just not true that everyone feels that practicing art is the main point then it's likely that you're discussing people who don't consider themselves artists. i used to know some folks who did graphic design for advertisements - they didn't consider that art, as the point of the banners etc that they made was to attract attention and get people to spend money on a client's website, not to express themselves in some meaningful way. they were under no delusion that they were creating anything that could be considered near the same category as a Picasso (for example).
      - ilaksh 2y ago
        Text to image is a very efficient way to express yourself meaningfully.
        text0404 2y ago
        disagree. it's a very (environmentally) inefficient way to mass produce meaningless, generic pictures which are poor stand-ins for authentic expressions the human condition.
    - 52-6F-62 2y ago
      Tell me, why dont you “drill down” and explain what is so pretentious about suggesting you might need to commit yourself to a practice in order to understand it. A pencil and paper are far cheaper and more accessible than a laptop and online subscriptions to “gen ai platform of the month”. As I said elsewhere, if you think the artifact is all that matters then you are lost. And I have better things to do than get mired in rhetorical bickering. Once software has “eaten the world” then it will starve with nothing more of value to consume. I will still be here. And for some bloody reason still doing my taxes by hand while some energy hungry machine churns out Rembrandt imitations that I don’t bother viewing.
      - t14321 2y ago
        In some cases maybe it's less about superiority or inferiority of either approach but where the interest lies? A person who has become accustomed to taking an engineering (or yes, unfortunately enough, a marketing) approach throughout their life may be more naturally drawn to a process that appeals to them rather than one that is unfamiliar. Especially as they grow older and their way of the world solidifies, since up to that point that mindset has served them well in their usual non-art domain. I will be the first to say that I do not consider genAI as "art" in the traditional sense. And that the two approaches are not, and will never be, equivalent for the reasons of personal self-development outlined elsewhere in this thread. At the same time, I did do as you say and spent a lot of time and effort on analogue pencil/ink on paper drawing for a year and a half in rebellion to this genAI commodification of everything. I did a few free tutorials but in general just tried to sit down somewhere and draw anything, free of any boundaries or restrictions, to keep my mind on drawing. After months and months of it, on a near daily basis, I just lost interest. I didn't have a strong drive to get really good beyond what I considered chicken scratches. Now of course you could say something like I needed to spend more effort instead of stopping that early not truly understanding the process of drawing, but to me it feels like fitting a square peg into a round hole. It's about different people having a different alignment of interests. For example I find music processing tools like pure data far more interesting than anything related to pen-on-paper, and have created a lot of things with them (without any AI involvement), arguably rather artistic things, in a shorter timeframe, because I enjoyed it more than drawing. Likely because those systems feel more like engineering to me. So in my opinion, some portion of the people insisting on genAI's superiority as an approach (completely the wrong thing to say IMO) in reality wouldn't have had much interest in creating art perhaps for the rest of their lives if genAI hadn't been invented at all. GenAI to those people is an indicator of how invested they are in art/personal reflection/growth, etc. Which is: not much, in comparison to other things. But to them that's fine. And it wouldn't have been much different without genAI, only you wouldn't have heard of all those people in an art-world context 6 years ago anyway - save for something perspective-altering like psychedelics, maybe. And this also applies between domains within art as well. A person's interest in digital painting may never reach the same level as that of EDM production. And some portion of those hypothetical EDM producers will, unfortunately or not, discover a way of reclaiming the leftover time for their less-important hobbies in smashing a button 10 times. When the bar has been lowered so low that someone can push a button and have a flurry of artifact imitations spit out, people will be naturally curious for at least a short time. When a few of them also realize that this places the domain of "art" (for whichever faulty or not definition they started with) into an engineering realm involving all sorts of sparkly bits like k-diffusion methods and LoRAs and UNets and activation functions and such, it's not surprising that some engineering-minded people would think to themselves "oh, this can become my way of expressing myself." However flawed that reasoning may be.
echelon 2y ago
> Obsolete… The fucking hubris There are some real dangers here that need to be navigated. Junior artists who get their start doing commissions are not going to have that path anymore. Reddit's job boards for junior artists are a literal desert now. In a sense, the activation energy gradient to producing good results has lowered such that the economic reward for up and coming artists has deteriorated. > Why don’t you let the artists maintain their own practice, rather than pressuring your friends to join you in yours? Artists who get their start in AI early can build recognition and clout within the community. They'll potentially be at a big advantage. a16z is investing in non-technical artists to bootstrap production and community. There's actually a lot of interesting stuff happening when you dive in to AI art.
- dartos 2y ago
  For now. It’s just market forces being unsure about the future of hiring artists. Companies are like lemmings, they just follow one another. Artists already know that gen AI is just another tool in the toolbox. We’re just waiting for MBAs to also realize this. GenAI making artists obsolete is a dumb idea. No MBA is going to be trying to coax a GenAI model into making an image.
  - echelon 2y ago
    I don't think I made my argument clear. This isn't about companies not paying artists, it's about peer-to-peer opportunities contracting and the market shrinking at the bottom. https://www.reddit.com/r/artistforhire/ https://www.reddit.com/r/artistforhire/ This is hardly the only community for this, and it's evaporated into a ghost town. Prices have decreased an order of magnitude. This is one of the ways up and coming artists without professional training get started earning money from their skill set. You should see also how Fiverr has filled up with GenAI artists that are pricing out traditional artists. Fiverr isn't typically a place for highly skilled work - it's for newbies and developing world opportunities. And now the money is thinning out.
    - dartos 2y ago
      Oh yes absolutely. Contract art for individuals looking for a custom image has been devastated by GenAI. This makes a little more sense as the bar for quality is much lower than a widespread commercial product and most individuals are willing to compromise on that to get a good desktop wallpaper quickly for free. Even local events have been using AI banner images.
cdrini 2y ago
He said he's trying assuage his friends' concerns that artists are obsolete. Ie op agrees that artists are not obsolete.
- uludag 2y ago
  I think there's a condition though. That if they learn generative AI tools then they won't be obsolete. If op was just of the view that there's nothing special about generative AI, then the post would read very different.
  - cdrini 2y ago
    I think they think that generative AI might help give his artist friends a competitive edge against other artists, which would help make them more hirable, hence assuaging their concerns of obsolescence. My guess would be OP thinks generative AI won't make artists obsolete, but might make being an artist more competitive. But I reckon we're just speculating on their internal state.
- 52-6F-62 2y ago
  Obsolete for what purpose? I dont think any aspiring artist, professional or otherwise, was ever deeply concerned about their future prospects in creating corporate graphics or mechanical pop songs. It was a fast buck, that’s all. Attempting to seduce them into committing ever more of their creative efforts in the service of a machine that only seeks to churn out more artifacts misses the entire point of ever starting, and especially continuing, an artistic practice of any kind. The entire purpose is in the act of creating and the efforts involved in honing a craft that entirely relies on your commitment. It doesn’t get any simpler or less pretentious. The road to mastery is the entire bloody point. Trying to encourage your own friends to short circuit that only serves in getting you to the artifact faster, and in the process neglects anything of any value from the entire process. Is that really being a friend? Unless you think the only thing that matters here is the artifact. Then you’re lost.
  - achenet 2y ago
deleted 2y ago
[deleted]
bee_rider 2y ago
> What resources would you point your friends to who both want to learn about generative AI and assuage their fears that AI will make artists obsolete? It seems like your post is mostly based on assumptions about the poster, and a misreading(?) of this one word. There’s no hubris in wanting to assuage people’s fears that their skills might become obsolete. > The important part of art is the practice and the transformation that occurs in the creator. They claim to be engaging (talking to friends) to the extent that they can be without already being a working artist. Maybe they are lying, but all we have is a post on the Internet, so if we assume the author of the post is a liar, we don’t have much to go by. > You will never understand this unless you engage. Trying to circumvent it again and again will only result in circumambulating the point and will miss it every time. No matter how shiny the artifact that results. Do you actually work in art? I don’t. But what do you mean by engage? I’ve taken some art classes. It was fun. But this was a cultivated experience, I was paying the instructor to have fun and explore ideas. On the other hand, you can poke around online and find people who will complain about the day-to-day bullshit of their art jobs. I worry that, almost by definition, the easy paths to engagement are almost by-definition not going to give a good view of what the day-to-day bullshit experience looks like. People romanticize engineering and programming as well. The beauty of getting a tangible solution, sprung from your mind, that impacts the world. At the end of the day, a lot of houses and dinners were bought by the need to throw together boring assed corporate inventory management systems. Most work is the sort of stuff that nobody wants to do, after all. That’s why they pay you for it, rather than going the other way.
IanCal 2y ago
> Obsolete… The fucking hubris Oh, you didn't read the whole post. I'd recommend you do, it'd help with understanding and replying. > , rather than pressuring your friends to join you in yours? The OP is literally saying they're asking. There are more constructive ways of engaging. Let's try something simple. Have you ever used a pre-existing piece as part of your composition? Would it matter if that was not created manually? What's the least creative part of what you do, are there any bland things you could fill in (e.g. paint these clouds or grass for me).
keiferski 2y ago
Sorry, but graphic designers (who are the group of artists most affected by genAI) don't think this way, and I have a hard time believing you're actually interacting with any and discussing this issue, because this take is what I'll call "the trendy online anti AI art" viewpoint. In the real world, graphic designers are pretty pragmatic people that tend to master whatever toolset they can get their hands on.
- dr_dshiv 2y ago
  This is what I came here to say. Tech has been pretty central to the tools of professional graphic artists (which include video games) for a long time. I notice a lot of non-professional artists running to the rescue of artists. I suspect this is in part because there are a lot of young people who have pursued a degree in art and have been frustrated by the mismatch of their expectations in the commercial world. There is a lot of romanticism. I myself went to art school (MFA). Actually I was really grossed out by the big Art gallery scene. It professes to be open minded, anti establishment and non commercial but it is extremely narrow in politics, hugely elitist and deeply oriented around big money. That’s ok, but I wouldn’t claim that Art has any moral superiority.
Vaslo 2y ago
"The important part of art is the practice and the transformation that occurs in the creator." So if you make your art for "you", why should I care about it? If this is how artists feel then bring on the AI.
- handfuloflight 2y ago
  If you make it for you, don't show it to me.
dang 2y ago
Can you please avoid the flamewar style on HN? You're welcome to express your views, but not like this—it's against the intended spirit of the site. If you want to express your substantive points thoughtfully, that would be fine. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

[flagged]

In this view the purpose of creating art is self-development? I suspect we could drill down into what you are trying to say for a whole thread but the result is just going to be a specification for pretension.

52-6F-62 2y ago
In all views. It certainly isn't a checkbox. Why don’t you shelve the pretentious corporate rhetoric yourself and re-read what I’ve suggested. Get off the computer and pick up a pencil, or mound of clay, or whatever, and give it a few years of regular practice. Theres nothing pretentious about that. It will do everything and I will need to say nothing.
- ilaksh 2y ago
  "In all views". "It will do everything and I will need to say nothing". Those are the pretentious parts of your reply. It's just not true that everyone feels that practicing art is the main point. Sure, it can be developmental for an individual.
  - text0404 2y ago
    > It's just not true that everyone feels that practicing art is the main point then it's likely that you're discussing people who don't consider themselves artists. i used to know some folks who did graphic design for advertisements - they didn't consider that art, as the point of the banners etc that they made was to attract attention and get people to spend money on a client's website, not to express themselves in some meaningful way. they were under no delusion that they were creating anything that could be considered near the same category as a Picasso (for example).
    - ilaksh 2y ago
      Text to image is a very efficient way to express yourself meaningfully.
      - text0404 2y ago
        disagree. it's a very (environmentally) inefficient way to mass produce meaningless, generic pictures which are poor stand-ins for authentic expressions the human condition.
  - 52-6F-62 2y ago
    Tell me, why dont you “drill down” and explain what is so pretentious about suggesting you might need to commit yourself to a practice in order to understand it. A pencil and paper are far cheaper and more accessible than a laptop and online subscriptions to “gen ai platform of the month”. As I said elsewhere, if you think the artifact is all that matters then you are lost. And I have better things to do than get mired in rhetorical bickering. Once software has “eaten the world” then it will starve with nothing more of value to consume. I will still be here. And for some bloody reason still doing my taxes by hand while some energy hungry machine churns out Rembrandt imitations that I don’t bother viewing.
    - t14321 2y ago
      In some cases maybe it's less about superiority or inferiority of either approach but where the interest lies? A person who has become accustomed to taking an engineering (or yes, unfortunately enough, a marketing) approach throughout their life may be more naturally drawn to a process that appeals to them rather than one that is unfamiliar. Especially as they grow older and their way of the world solidifies, since up to that point that mindset has served them well in their usual non-art domain. I will be the first to say that I do not consider genAI as "art" in the traditional sense. And that the two approaches are not, and will never be, equivalent for the reasons of personal self-development outlined elsewhere in this thread. At the same time, I did do as you say and spent a lot of time and effort on analogue pencil/ink on paper drawing for a year and a half in rebellion to this genAI commodification of everything. I did a few free tutorials but in general just tried to sit down somewhere and draw anything, free of any boundaries or restrictions, to keep my mind on drawing. After months and months of it, on a near daily basis, I just lost interest. I didn't have a strong drive to get really good beyond what I considered chicken scratches. Now of course you could say something like I needed to spend more effort instead of stopping that early not truly understanding the process of drawing, but to me it feels like fitting a square peg into a round hole. It's about different people having a different alignment of interests. For example I find music processing tools like pure data far more interesting than anything related to pen-on-paper, and have created a lot of things with them (without any AI involvement), arguably rather artistic things, in a shorter timeframe, because I enjoyed it more than drawing. Likely because those systems feel more like engineering to me. So in my opinion, some portion of the people insisting on genAI's superiority as an approach (completely the wrong thing to say IMO) in reality wouldn't have had much interest in creating art perhaps for the rest of their lives if genAI hadn't been invented at all. GenAI to those people is an indicator of how invested they are in art/personal reflection/growth, etc. Which is: not much, in comparison to other things. But to them that's fine. And it wouldn't have been much different without genAI, only you wouldn't have heard of all those people in an art-world context 6 years ago anyway - save for something perspective-altering like psychedelics, maybe. And this also applies between domains within art as well. A person's interest in digital painting may never reach the same level as that of EDM production. And some portion of those hypothetical EDM producers will, unfortunately or not, discover a way of reclaiming the leftover time for their less-important hobbies in smashing a button 10 times. When the bar has been lowered so low that someone can push a button and have a flurry of artifact imitations spit out, people will be naturally curious for at least a short time. When a few of them also realize that this places the domain of "art" (for whichever faulty or not definition they started with) into an engineering realm involving all sorts of sparkly bits like k-diffusion methods and LoRAs and UNets and activation functions and such, it's not surprising that some engineering-minded people would think to themselves "oh, this can become my way of expressing myself." However flawed that reasoning may be.

echelon 2y ago

> Obsolete… The fucking hubris There are some real dangers here that need to be navigated. Junior artists who get their start doing commissions are not going to have that path anymore. Reddit's job boards for junior artists are a literal desert now. In a sense, the activation energy gradient to producing good results has lowered such that the economic reward for up and coming artists has deteriorated. > Why don’t you let the artists maintain their own practice, rather than pressuring your friends to join you in yours? Artists who get their start in AI early can build recognition and clout within the community. They'll potentially be at a big advantage. a16z is investing in non-technical artists to bootstrap production and community. There's actually a lot of interesting stuff happening when you dive in to AI art.

dartos 2y ago
For now. It’s just market forces being unsure about the future of hiring artists. Companies are like lemmings, they just follow one another. Artists already know that gen AI is just another tool in the toolbox. We’re just waiting for MBAs to also realize this. GenAI making artists obsolete is a dumb idea. No MBA is going to be trying to coax a GenAI model into making an image.
- echelon 2y ago
  I don't think I made my argument clear. This isn't about companies not paying artists, it's about peer-to-peer opportunities contracting and the market shrinking at the bottom. https://www.reddit.com/r/artistforhire/ https://www.reddit.com/r/artistforhire/ This is hardly the only community for this, and it's evaporated into a ghost town. Prices have decreased an order of magnitude. This is one of the ways up and coming artists without professional training get started earning money from their skill set. You should see also how Fiverr has filled up with GenAI artists that are pricing out traditional artists. Fiverr isn't typically a place for highly skilled work - it's for newbies and developing world opportunities. And now the money is thinning out.
  - dartos 2y ago
    Oh yes absolutely. Contract art for individuals looking for a custom image has been devastated by GenAI. This makes a little more sense as the bar for quality is much lower than a widespread commercial product and most individuals are willing to compromise on that to get a good desktop wallpaper quickly for free. Even local events have been using AI banner images.

cdrini 2y ago

He said he's trying assuage his friends' concerns that artists are obsolete. Ie op agrees that artists are not obsolete.

uludag 2y ago
I think there's a condition though. That if they learn generative AI tools then they won't be obsolete. If op was just of the view that there's nothing special about generative AI, then the post would read very different.
- cdrini 2y ago
  I think they think that generative AI might help give his artist friends a competitive edge against other artists, which would help make them more hirable, hence assuaging their concerns of obsolescence. My guess would be OP thinks generative AI won't make artists obsolete, but might make being an artist more competitive. But I reckon we're just speculating on their internal state.
52-6F-62 2y ago
Obsolete for what purpose? I dont think any aspiring artist, professional or otherwise, was ever deeply concerned about their future prospects in creating corporate graphics or mechanical pop songs. It was a fast buck, that’s all. Attempting to seduce them into committing ever more of their creative efforts in the service of a machine that only seeks to churn out more artifacts misses the entire point of ever starting, and especially continuing, an artistic practice of any kind. The entire purpose is in the act of creating and the efforts involved in honing a craft that entirely relies on your commitment. It doesn’t get any simpler or less pretentious. The road to mastery is the entire bloody point. Trying to encourage your own friends to short circuit that only serves in getting you to the artifact faster, and in the process neglects anything of any value from the entire process. Is that really being a friend? Unless you think the only thing that matters here is the artifact. Then you’re lost.
- achenet 2y ago

deleted 2y ago

[deleted]

bee_rider 2y ago

> What resources would you point your friends to who both want to learn about generative AI and assuage their fears that AI will make artists obsolete? It seems like your post is mostly based on assumptions about the poster, and a misreading(?) of this one word. There’s no hubris in wanting to assuage people’s fears that their skills might become obsolete. > The important part of art is the practice and the transformation that occurs in the creator. They claim to be engaging (talking to friends) to the extent that they can be without already being a working artist. Maybe they are lying, but all we have is a post on the Internet, so if we assume the author of the post is a liar, we don’t have much to go by. > You will never understand this unless you engage. Trying to circumvent it again and again will only result in circumambulating the point and will miss it every time. No matter how shiny the artifact that results. Do you actually work in art? I don’t. But what do you mean by engage? I’ve taken some art classes. It was fun. But this was a cultivated experience, I was paying the instructor to have fun and explore ideas. On the other hand, you can poke around online and find people who will complain about the day-to-day bullshit of their art jobs. I worry that, almost by definition, the easy paths to engagement are almost by-definition not going to give a good view of what the day-to-day bullshit experience looks like. People romanticize engineering and programming as well. The beauty of getting a tangible solution, sprung from your mind, that impacts the world. At the end of the day, a lot of houses and dinners were bought by the need to throw together boring assed corporate inventory management systems. Most work is the sort of stuff that nobody wants to do, after all. That’s why they pay you for it, rather than going the other way.

IanCal 2y ago

> Obsolete… The fucking hubris Oh, you didn't read the whole post. I'd recommend you do, it'd help with understanding and replying. > , rather than pressuring your friends to join you in yours? The OP is literally saying they're asking. There are more constructive ways of engaging. Let's try something simple. Have you ever used a pre-existing piece as part of your composition? Would it matter if that was not created manually? What's the least creative part of what you do, are there any bland things you could fill in (e.g. paint these clouds or grass for me).

keiferski 2y ago

Sorry, but graphic designers (who are the group of artists most affected by genAI) don't think this way, and I have a hard time believing you're actually interacting with any and discussing this issue, because this take is what I'll call "the trendy online anti AI art" viewpoint. In the real world, graphic designers are pretty pragmatic people that tend to master whatever toolset they can get their hands on.

dr_dshiv 2y ago
This is what I came here to say. Tech has been pretty central to the tools of professional graphic artists (which include video games) for a long time. I notice a lot of non-professional artists running to the rescue of artists. I suspect this is in part because there are a lot of young people who have pursued a degree in art and have been frustrated by the mismatch of their expectations in the commercial world. There is a lot of romanticism. I myself went to art school (MFA). Actually I was really grossed out by the big Art gallery scene. It professes to be open minded, anti establishment and non commercial but it is extremely narrow in politics, hugely elitist and deeply oriented around big money. That’s ok, but I wouldn’t claim that Art has any moral superiority.

Vaslo 2y ago

"The important part of art is the practice and the transformation that occurs in the creator." So if you make your art for "you", why should I care about it? If this is how artists feel then bring on the AI.

handfuloflight 2y ago
If you make it for you, don't show it to me.

dang 2y ago

Can you please avoid the flamewar style on HN? You're welcome to express your views, but not like this—it's against the intended spirit of the site. If you want to express your substantive points thoughtfully, that would be fine. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html