10 ms·
In previous eras there were many purists who considered photography not-art, sequencer and synthesizer made music not-music, other forms of (non-AI) digital art
by api 9mo ago
In previous eras there were many purists who considered photography not-art, sequencer and synthesizer made music not-music, other forms of (non-AI) digital art less legitimate than their more manual classical counterparts, etc. This is the same discourse all over again.
Is electronic music where the artist composes it on a screen and then hits 'play' music? I think it is, of course, but I have had experiences where I went to see a musician "live" and well... they brought the laptop with them. But I think it still counts. It was still fun.
AI slop is to AI art what point and shoot amateur photography is to artistic photography. The difference is how much artistic intent and actual work is present. AI art has yet to get people like Ansel Adams, but it will -- actual artists who use AI as a tool to make novel forms and styles of art.
(I used an emdash!)
This is an outstanding read: https://medium.com/@aaronhertzmann/how-photography-became-an-art-form-7b74da777c63 https://medium.com/@aaronhertzmann/how-photography-became-an...
Anti-photography discourse sounds exactly like anti-AI discourse to the point that you could search and replace terms and have the same rants.
Another thing I expect to see is novelists using AI to create at least passable live action versions of their stories. I don't think these will put real actors or actresses out of work for a long time, but I could see them serving as "sizzle reels" to sell a real production. If an author posts their AI-generated film of their novel and it gets popular, I could see a studio picking it up and making a real movie or TV show from it.
- bogzz 9mo agoI don't believe that there is near enough room for creativity to shine through in the prompt-generation pipeline, and I find the mention of a talent like Ansel Adams in this context asinine. There is no control there, and without control over creation I don't believe that creativity CAN flourish, but I may be wrong. Electronic music is analogous to digital art made by humans, not generated art.
- api 9mo agoHow much room for creativity is there with a camera? Angle, lighting, F-stop, film type, film processing? I have a local image generator app called Draw Things that has many times more options than this. Early synthesizers weren't that versatile either. Bands like Pink Floyd actually got into electronics and tore them apart and hacked them. Early techno and hip-hop artists did similar things and even figured out how to transform a simple record player into a musical instrument by hopping the needle around and scratching records back and forth with tremendous skill. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NnRVmiqm84k https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NnRVmiqm84k https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ekgpZag6xyQ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ekgpZag6xyQ Serious AI artists will start tearing apart open models and changing how they work internally. They'll learn the math and how they work just like a serious photographer could tell you all about film emulsions and developing processes and how film reacts to light. Art's never about what it does. It's about what it can do.
- bogzz 9mo agoI do not think that the things you say will happen, will ever happen. Also, photography has the added benefit of documenting the world as it is, but through the artist's lens. That added value does not exist when it comes to slop.
- CamperBob2 9mo agoI do not think that the things you say will happen, will ever happen. When's the last time someone who said something like that was right?
- caconym_ 9mo ago> How much room for creativity is there with a camera? Angle, lighting, F-stop, film type, film processing? How many subjects exist in the world to be photographed? How many journeys might one take to find them? How many stories might each subject tell with the right treatment? > Serious AI artists will start tearing apart open models and changing how they work internally. They'll learn the math and how they work just like a serious photographer could tell you all about film emulsions and developing processes and how film reacts to light. I agree that "AI art" as it exists today is not serious.
- api 9mo ago"AI art" today is mostly play, which is usually the first thing you get with new artistic tools. People just fool around with them in an un-serious way. There's also some porn. Porn is always early. It was one of the first uses for moving pictures, for example. "The early adopters of new technologies are usually porn and the military." Forget where I heard that but it's largely true.
- IlliOnato 9mo agoYou may check these videos by Oleg Kuvaev. 100% generated using AI. Everything: text, music, characters, voices, editing -- all done via prompts, using multiple engines (I think he mentioned about a dozen services involved). I would not call it "high art", but it's definitely not a slop, it's an artist skillfully using AI as a tool. https://youtu.be/A2H62x_-k5Q?si=EHq5Y4KCzBfo0tfm https://youtu.be/A2H62x_-k5Q?si=EHq5Y4KCzBfo0tfm https://youtu.be/rzCpT_S536c?si=pxiDY4TPhF_YLfRc https://youtu.be/rzCpT_S536c?si=pxiDY4TPhF_YLfRc https://youtu.be/wPVe365vpCc?si=AqhpaZHYb4ldSf3F https://youtu.be/wPVe365vpCc?si=AqhpaZHYb4ldSf3F https://youtu.be/EBaGqojNJfc?si=1CoLn4oeNxK-7bpe https://youtu.be/EBaGqojNJfc?si=1CoLn4oeNxK-7bpe
- shayway 9mo agoWhile we're sharing AI generated videos, IGORRR's ADHD music video [0] is definitively art, zero question about it. I don't think typing a prompt in and taking the output as it comes is art -- good art, anyway (the point-and-shoot photography comparison is apt) -- but that doesn't mean AI can't be used to make truly new, creative and unique art too. [0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TGIvO4eh190 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TGIvO4eh190 (warning, lots of disturbing imagery)
- dgroshev 9mo agoThis is absolutely slop. Higher quality slop, but slop nonetheless. Ask yourself: what does it say? What does it change in you? How this makes you feel? Artists use their medium to communicate. More often than not, everything in a piece is deliberate. What is being communicated here? Who deliberated on the details? Those videos are as much "art" as Marvel's endless slop is "art".
- throw4r3ttyu 9mo agoDoes it not describe what the prompter wants it to describe? This is like saying a director isn’t really an artist simply because all they do is direct things.
- Pet_Ant 9mo ago> I don't believe that there is near enough room for creativity to shine through in the prompt-generation pipeline I mean you are building a prompt and tweaking it. I mean even if you didn't do that you could still argue that finding it is in itself a creative akin to found art [1]. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Found_object https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Found_object
- bogzz 9mo agoI suppose. You're "finding" something that didn't exist and that nobody ever cared about. Something that you wrote, mashed against the tensors trained on real artist creations, and out came the thing that you "found". I'm genuinely amazed at how some people perceive art.
- Pet_Ant 9mo agoTo me art has always been "an interesting idea". Decorative things that take skill to me are crafts. Sure, it's a water color of your garden, but what does it tell us about the human condition? Sure, it's skilled... but it's empty. Give me Jackson Pollock or Picasso. Give me a new way to see the world. Pure skill to me is as impressive as cup-stacking personally. Not saying you have to agree, but it is a distillation of how some portion of the world sees the world.
- LogicFailsMe 9mo agoDefining art in this way is like defining intelligence as the possession of a degree from Stanford. It's just branding. Art shouldn't make you feel comfortable and safe. It should provoke you and in this sense AI art is doing the job better than traditional art at the moment here. Other than the technological aspect, there's nothing new under the sun here. And at its very worst, AI art is just Andy Warhol at hyperscale. https://wbpopphilosopher.wordpress.com/2023/05/07/andy-warhol-wasnt-an-artist/ https://wbpopphilosopher.wordpress.com/2023/05/07/andy-warho...
- bogzz 9mo agoI Ghiblified a photo of my dog when chatgpt 4 came out. I was utterly horrified by the results. It's exciting being able to say that I am an artist, I always wondered what my life would have been had I gone into the arts, and now I can experience it! Thank you techmology.
- LogicFailsMe 9mo agoIf you really want to experience the struggles and persecution of an artist, you should empty your bank account and find a life partner to support you while you struggle with your angst and inner trauma that are the source of your creativity. But, to be fair, complaining about AI art is a great start down that path!
- bogzz 9mo agoLogic might fail you, but snark is Ol' Faithful it seems.
- LogicFailsMe 9mo agoHow else would you address the incessant ramblings of people who figuratively curse the sunset daily? After AI art has been integrated into the already existing suite of digital art applications (which themselves were once not considered art), whatever shall you complain about next? Now if you wanted to define art to require 100% bodily fluids and solids 100% handcrafted to be the only real art, now that I'd understand.
- CamperBob2 9mo agoI don't believe that there is near enough room for creativity to shine through in the prompt-generation pipeline You seem so sure that you'll always be able to tell what you're looking at, and whether it's the result of prompting or some unspecified but doubtlessly-noble act of "creativity." LOL. Not much else can be said, but... LOL.
- Aerroon 9mo agoYou know that you can give a drawing as input for image generation, right? I think there's a lot of creativity possible with AI image generation. Things like ControlNet and the various loras and upscale methods etc all add a lot of choice.
- RiverCrochet 9mo ago> Is electronic music where the artist composes it on a screen and then hits 'play' music? If X composes something, X is an artist. The person playing a composed work is a performer. Some people have both the roles of artist and performer for a given work. To say an AI composes something is anthropomorphizing a computer. If you enter a prompt to make a machine generate work based on existing artists' art, you're not composing (in the artistic sense) and neither is the computer. Math isn't art even if it's pretty or if mathematical concepts are used in art. The term "director" instead of composer or artist conveys what's happening a lot better with telling machines to generate art via prompts.
- mattmanser 9mo agoThe vast majority of artists in all fields don't really have their own style and are just copying other people's. Doesn't matter whether we're talking about art, literature, music, film, whatever. It takes a rare genius to make a new style, and they come along a few times a generation. And even they will often admit they built on top of existing styles and other artists. I'm not a fan of AI work or anything, but we need to be honest about what human 'creativity' usually is, which for most artists is basically copying the trends of the time with at most a minor twist. OTOH, I think when you start entering the fringes of AI work you really start seeing how much it's just stealing other people's work though. With more niche subjects, it will often produce copies of the few artists in that field with a few minor, often bad, changes.
- matthewkayin 9mo agoSure, you can say that AI is just "stealing like an artist", but that makes the AI the artist in this scenario, not the prompter. It bothers me that all of the AI "artists" insist that they are just the same as any other artist, even though it was the AI that did all of the work. Even when a human artist is just copying the styles they've seen from other artists, they still had to put in the effort to develop their craft to make the art in the first place.
- chowells 9mo agoI mostly agree with your sentiment, but saying "math is not art" is the same as saying "writing is not art". Calculation isn't art. But math isn't calculation. Math is a social activity shared between humans. Like writing, much of it is purely utilitarian. But there's always an aesthetic component, and some works explore that without regard to utility. It's a funny kind of art, accessible to few and beautiful to even fewer. But there is an art there.
- xgulfie 9mo ago> AI slop is to AI art what point and shoot amateur photography is to artistic photography. Sorry... It's all slop buddy. The medium is the message, and genAI's message is "I want it cheap and with low effort, and I don't care too much about how it looks"
- llbbdd 9mo agoJust like photography
- sdwr 9mo agoSo art is just a status signifier? "This is hard to make so I must be really special"?
- irishcoffee 9mo agoUh, yes?
- majormajor 9mo ago"This is hard to make" hasn't been the distinguishing factor for popular/expensive/trendy art for a long time. There is a literal cliche "my six year old could've done this" about how some of the techniques do not require the years of training they used to. And a literal cliche response about how the eye and execution is the current determining factor: "but they didn't."
- caconym_ 9mo agoIt is more useful to think about it in terms of what that effort actually entails. If you haven't ever written a novel, or even a short story, you cannot possibly imagine how much of your own weird self ends up in it, and that is a huge part of what will make it interesting for people to read. You can also express ideas as subtext, through the application of technique and structure. I have never reached this level with any form of visual art but I imagine it's largely the same. A prompt, or even a series of prompts, simply cannot encode such a rich payload. Another thing artists understand is that ideas are cheap and execution is everything; in practice, everything people are getting out of these AI tools is founded on a cheap idea and built from an averaging of everything the AI was trained on. There is nothing interesting in there, nothing unique, nothing more than superficially personal; just more of the most generic version of what you think you want. And I think a lot of people are finding that that isn't, in fact, what they want.
- b00ty4breakfast 9mo agoTHING IN PAST SIMILAR MUST BE SAME THING you enjoy your industrial effluent, I'm gonna stick to human artists making art
- bluSCALE4 9mo agoWhatever, man, this guy isn't wrong. Look at the example he gave how a camera made it so that anyone could do what only a few could. Novel art is just a candid shot now. It forced art to completely change its values. Much of the same will happen now. The difference is that with the past, we still needed artists to take advantage of them while now, it all can be completely automated. It's disgusting but I'm sure purest thought the same of every innovation.
- b00ty4breakfast 9mo agothat's not art, that's product. Enjoy it, you deserve every ounce of it.
- lawlessone 9mo agoKeyboards have had functions that let them play music at the touch of button for decades. Decades later we still don't consider anyone using that function a musician. >actual artists who use AI as a tool to make novel forms and styles of art. writing a prompt lol We don't compare Usain Bolt to Lewis Hamilton when talking about fastest runners in the world. But hey think about how much money you could save on a wedding photographer if you just generate a few images of what the wedding probably looked like!
- Aerroon 9mo agoThe (wedding) photographer is likely going to use this AI themselves though. They used Photoshop way back in the day to touch up images. They're going to be doing the same with genAI. Content-aware fill is one of the most useful tools they have.
- api 9mo agoYour reasoning process here is: There is a "demo" button on synthesizers that plays a canned melody, therefore playing canned melodies is all synthesizers can do, therefore nobody that uses a synthesizer is a real musician.
- lawlessone 9mo agoYeah i'm saying the prompter is the button presser. If i commission Michelangelo to paint me a picture that doesn't make me a renaissance artist.
- smoe 9mo agoI'm not against AI art per se, but at least so far, most “AI artists” I see online seem to care very little about the artistry of what they’re doing, and much much more about selling their stuff. Among the traditional artists I follow, maybe 1 out of 10 posts is directly about selling something. With AI artists, it’s more like 9 out of 10. It might take a while for all the grifters to realize that making a living from creative work is very hard before more genuinely interesting AI art starts to surface eventually. I started following a few because I liked an image that showed up in my feed, but quickly unfollowed after being hit with a daily barrage of NFT promotions.