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> As a moonlighting digital artist, I feel like this is the same thing as a painter saying they’re not sure if the paintbrush is the artist. This is non-sensic

> As a moonlighting digital artist, I feel like this is the same thing as a painter saying they’re not sure if the paintbrush is the artist. This is non-sensical. You hold the paintbrush and move it across the medium with your own hand. It is entirely within the artists control. With a computer, you tell it what to do and within it's own constraints, be that p5.js or an llm whatever algorithm will produce some result.

btouellette 1y ago
No it really isn't. Is Jackson Pollock entirely directing each drop of paint or is there some inherent randomness that is being guided and directed at a higher level? There's a clear analogy to digital art where there exists along a continuum things like traditional digital art tools -> algorithmic generative art -> LLM generated art at varying levels of direct control.
- 4ndrewl 1y ago
  Sim to the other reply, Pollock flicks the paint, he doesn't instruct something to generate flicked paint...
  - achierius 1y ago
    Is your gripe purely that text is involved in the middle? If a paralyzed man painted by verbalizing commands -- left, right, up, down -- that "instructed" a simple machine to move the paintbrush, then by your definition he would simply be "instructing" a machine to "generate" the painting.
recursive 1y ago
When Bob Ross scrapes his knife across a canvas to create a jagged rock field, he doesn't have a detailed plan for exactly which rocks will appear and where. But he knows that that it will create a a rough patchy area alternating between two colors that will look like shadows in the context where he's doing it. When you use the pencil tool across the screen in photoshop, it works just as a pencil on paper. The difference is not so clear as you imply.
- 4ndrewl 1y ago
  The difference surely is that Bob scrapes the knife, not Bob instructs the knife to scrape paint?
  - recursive 1y ago
    I'm not sure there's a clear difference. When using a wacom tablet, using the pencil tool in photoshop is very similar to using a pencil. You're "instructing" the pencil tool to move by moving the pencil controller with respect to the tablet. I know AI slop art when I see it, and I have no interest it making or "consuming" it. But I don't think I could construct a robust definition that would stand up to adversarial scrutiny.
  - zeckalpha 1y ago
    Physics and computing aren't all that different.
dahart 1y ago
There certainly are some physical and process differences between computer art and traditional painting, but I’m not yet convinced you understood what I said. What you have not demonstrated in any way is why the computer should be credited as the artist, or where the computer has any intention. Could the art happen without the human artist? No, it cannot. No computer has ever made art on its own. Could the art happen without the computer? Yes it’s possible, to the degree the artist can imagine the work and create it in a different medium. Shelley Lake did not use p5.js nor an LLM for The Last Starfighter, and I didn’t use either of those things either. She may not have written the software she was using, and generally speaking I do write the software. I don’t know that it matters who writes the software, but it does make it easier to diffuse artistic credit if you use complex tools you don’t build yourself. I have done quite a bit of both physical painting and digital art and in both cases I’m deciding what gets done, designing the outcome, making the tools myself, and like a paintbrush, the computer doesn’t participate in any of that. The computer is just as much a tool as a brush, and is no more an artist than the brush is. LLMs are brand new to art, they are not relevant to the top comment of this thread, and in terms of provenance of an image they are not understood by the public yet. I don’t feel that you’ve offered any clear thinking about how to attribute images produced using an LLM. It would be best to leave them out of the discussion for now, but FWIW they don’t change the calculus of computers vs intent and attribution much, they only muddy the water due to humans making all the training data.
- smcameron 1y ago
  So, here is some computer created art ("art"?): https://imgur.com/x4eR2HQ https://imgur.com/x4eR2HQ I have many many more like it. https://imgur.com/tCYhZEy https://imgur.com/tCYhZEy I wrote the program that creates that. When I wrote it, my goal was to make a procedurally generated gas giant planet of some sort, but I didn't even know if what I was attempting would work (and for a period of about a month, it didn't work). I had/have only rudimentary control over the output. I can control the colors that go into it. I can control, to some degree, the scale of the "swirliness", but not the details of the swirliness. I can control how long I let the "swirliness" progress, and a few other things. But, I never know ahead of time how it's going to come out, and it's hard to escape the obvious fact that the computer has done nearly all of the work, and I only gave it the vaguest of directions in terms of aesthetics, although I did give it very specific instructions about how to do everything it did, those instructions were so complicated and so many, that I had next to no idea what specific output those instructions might produce, except in the most general terms. When I run the program, there's an anticipation ... "oooh, I hope this one comes out good!" but I don't know ahead of time whether it will or not.
notnmeyer 1y ago
i don’t buy it. what if i’m using a tablet and drawing in photoshop? computer art isn’t just code and ai… whether it’s a physical or digital medium the artist is expressing their creativity and manipulating the tools to realize that vision.

btouellette 1y ago

No it really isn't. Is Jackson Pollock entirely directing each drop of paint or is there some inherent randomness that is being guided and directed at a higher level? There's a clear analogy to digital art where there exists along a continuum things like traditional digital art tools -> algorithmic generative art -> LLM generated art at varying levels of direct control.

4ndrewl 1y ago
Sim to the other reply, Pollock flicks the paint, he doesn't instruct something to generate flicked paint...
- achierius 1y ago
  Is your gripe purely that text is involved in the middle? If a paralyzed man painted by verbalizing commands -- left, right, up, down -- that "instructed" a simple machine to move the paintbrush, then by your definition he would simply be "instructing" a machine to "generate" the painting.

recursive 1y ago

When Bob Ross scrapes his knife across a canvas to create a jagged rock field, he doesn't have a detailed plan for exactly which rocks will appear and where. But he knows that that it will create a a rough patchy area alternating between two colors that will look like shadows in the context where he's doing it. When you use the pencil tool across the screen in photoshop, it works just as a pencil on paper. The difference is not so clear as you imply.

4ndrewl 1y ago
The difference surely is that Bob scrapes the knife, not Bob instructs the knife to scrape paint?
- recursive 1y ago
  I'm not sure there's a clear difference. When using a wacom tablet, using the pencil tool in photoshop is very similar to using a pencil. You're "instructing" the pencil tool to move by moving the pencil controller with respect to the tablet. I know AI slop art when I see it, and I have no interest it making or "consuming" it. But I don't think I could construct a robust definition that would stand up to adversarial scrutiny.
- zeckalpha 1y ago
  Physics and computing aren't all that different.

dahart 1y ago

There certainly are some physical and process differences between computer art and traditional painting, but I’m not yet convinced you understood what I said. What you have not demonstrated in any way is why the computer should be credited as the artist, or where the computer has any intention. Could the art happen without the human artist? No, it cannot. No computer has ever made art on its own. Could the art happen without the computer? Yes it’s possible, to the degree the artist can imagine the work and create it in a different medium. Shelley Lake did not use p5.js nor an LLM for The Last Starfighter, and I didn’t use either of those things either. She may not have written the software she was using, and generally speaking I do write the software. I don’t know that it matters who writes the software, but it does make it easier to diffuse artistic credit if you use complex tools you don’t build yourself. I have done quite a bit of both physical painting and digital art and in both cases I’m deciding what gets done, designing the outcome, making the tools myself, and like a paintbrush, the computer doesn’t participate in any of that. The computer is just as much a tool as a brush, and is no more an artist than the brush is. LLMs are brand new to art, they are not relevant to the top comment of this thread, and in terms of provenance of an image they are not understood by the public yet. I don’t feel that you’ve offered any clear thinking about how to attribute images produced using an LLM. It would be best to leave them out of the discussion for now, but FWIW they don’t change the calculus of computers vs intent and attribution much, they only muddy the water due to humans making all the training data.

smcameron 1y ago
So, here is some computer created art ("art"?): https://imgur.com/x4eR2HQ https://imgur.com/x4eR2HQ I have many many more like it. https://imgur.com/tCYhZEy https://imgur.com/tCYhZEy I wrote the program that creates that. When I wrote it, my goal was to make a procedurally generated gas giant planet of some sort, but I didn't even know if what I was attempting would work (and for a period of about a month, it didn't work). I had/have only rudimentary control over the output. I can control the colors that go into it. I can control, to some degree, the scale of the "swirliness", but not the details of the swirliness. I can control how long I let the "swirliness" progress, and a few other things. But, I never know ahead of time how it's going to come out, and it's hard to escape the obvious fact that the computer has done nearly all of the work, and I only gave it the vaguest of directions in terms of aesthetics, although I did give it very specific instructions about how to do everything it did, those instructions were so complicated and so many, that I had next to no idea what specific output those instructions might produce, except in the most general terms. When I run the program, there's an anticipation ... "oooh, I hope this one comes out good!" but I don't know ahead of time whether it will or not.

notnmeyer 1y ago

i don’t buy it. what if i’m using a tablet and drawing in photoshop? computer art isn’t just code and ai… whether it’s a physical or digital medium the artist is expressing their creativity and manipulating the tools to realize that vision.