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Some random predictions about what AI image generation tools will do/are doing to art: 1. The narrative/life of the artist becomes a lot more important. The mo

Some random predictions about what AI image generation tools will do/are doing to art: 1. The narrative/life of the artist becomes a lot more important. The most successful artists are ones that craft a story around their life and art, and don't just create stuff and stop. This will become even more important. 2. Originality matters more than ever. By design, these tools can only copy and mix things that already exist. But they aren't alive, they don't live in the world and have experiences, and they can't create something truly new. 3. Those that bother to learn the actual art skills, and not merely prompting, will increasingly be miles ahead of everyone else. People are lazy, and bothering to put in the time to actually learn stuff will stand out more and more. (Ditto for writing essays and other writing people are doing with AI.) 4. Taste continues to be the single most important thing. The vast, vast majority of AI art out there is...not very good. It's not going to get better, because the lack of taste isn't a technical problem. 5. Art with physical materials will become increasingly popular. That is, stuff that can't be digitized very well: sculpture, installation art, etc. Above all, AI art is uncool, which means it has no real future as a leading art form. This uncoolness will push people away from the screen and towards things that are more material.

avmich 8mo ago
I mostly disagree. > 1... The narrative/life of the artist becomes a lot more important. When I watch a movie, I don't care about the artist's life. I care about character life, that's very different. > 2... Originality matters more than ever. By design, these tools can only copy and mix things that already exist. It's like you assigning to humans divine capabilities :) . Hyperbolizing a little, humans also only copy and mix - where do you think originality comes from? Granted, AI isn't at the level of humans yet, but they improve here. > 4... It's not going to get better, because the lack of taste isn't a technical problem. Engineers are in business of converting non-technical problems into technical ones. Just like AI now is way more capable than it was 20 years ago, and able to write interesting texts and make interesting pictures - something which at the time wasn't considered a technical problem - with time what we perceive as "taste" may likely improve. > 5... Above all, AI art is uncool, which means it has no real future as a leading art form. AI critics are for a long time mistaking the level with trend. Or, giving a comparison with SpaceX achievements, "you're currently here" - when there was a list of "first, get to the orbit, then we'll talk", "first, start regular payload deliveries to orbit, then we'll talk", "first, land the stage... send crewed capsule... do that in numbers..." and then, currently "first, send the Starship to orbit". "You're currently here" is the always existing point which isn't achieved at the moment and which gives to critics something to point to and mount the objection to the process as a whole, because, see, this particular thing isn't achieved yet. You assume AI won't be able to make cool art with time. AI critics were shown time and time again to be underestimating the possibilities. Some people find it hard to learn in some particular topics.
- jplusequalt 8mo ago
  >Engineers are in business of converting non-technical problems into technical ones. Art is not a problem to be solved.
  - tmountain 8mo ago
    Art is a reaction to life. AI is thereby incapable of producing anything with any degree of authenticity unless it conveys the experience of being an agent to the world.
    - avmich 8mo ago
      Two comments here. First, "AI is thereby incapable" is a hypothesis, not a fact - how would you prove that you have to "live" to produce art? You might feel this way, you may suggest some correlations here - but can you really prove that? Second, I don't see impossibility for AI to be - to various degrees - an agent to the world. I think that's already happening actually - they are interacting with world even today, in some limited sense, through our computers and networks, and - today - not many of them actually "learn" from those interactions. But we're in the early days of this - I suspect.
    - ACCount37 8mo ago
      What is AI if not "a reaction to life"? With how much data goes into the frontier systems, and how much of it gets captured by them, an AI might have, in many ways, a richer grasp of human experience than the humans themselves do. You were only ever one human. An LLM has skimmed from millions. You have seen a tree, and the AI has seen the forest it stands in.
      - jplusequalt 8mo ago
        The AI has not "seen" or "experienced" anything, as it's not a sentient life form.
      - tmountain 8mo ago
        It’s a subjective conversation but putting AI in the same category as a real artist is like saying someone that’s played a ton of first person shooters has gone to war. It might have a lot of observed information about what is involved in living, but real art comes from a lived experience, just like reading about going to Hawaii doesn’t mean you’ve been to Hawaii. Making something authentic requires synthesizing your life experience with the message you want to convey, and personalizing it in a way that puts an imprint of yourself into the work. Sure, it can render beautiful imagery, but I am speaking to a different issue entirely, and I don’t see any way that it can create in the way I am describing.
bjackman 8mo ago
> The narrative/life of the artist becomes a lot more important. Less the narrative of the art's production and more the message that it's conveying. I don't mean (necessarily) a political message or a message that can be put in to words. But the abstract sense of connecting with the human who created it some way. This isn't just art though. An example: soon, Sora will be able to generate very convincing footage of a football match. Would any football fan watch this? No. A big part of why we watch football is that in some sense we care about the people who are playing. Same with visual art. AI art can be cool but in the end, I just don't really give a shit. Coz enjoying art is usually about the abstract sense that a human person decided to make the thing you are looking at, and now you are looking at it... And now what? This is why every time someone says "AI art sucks" and someone replies "oh yeah? But look at THIS AI art" I always wonder... What do you think art is _for_?
- selridge 8mo ago
  The problem is, we have no real understanding of what people will or will not do with this technology. Will humans only be interested in “real“ activity? We have no idea, and most people are just guessing in a way that flatters some understanding of art that they have. We also frankly have no idea what the permanent relationship of humans to art is even without AI. The television is less than 100 years old. There aren’t very many, but there are some people alive today who were alive before the television was created. The computer is about 80 years old. The whole idea of photography and of recorded audio is less uthan 150 years old. We are still living in the aftershocks of industrial production of art. It is foolish to imagine that in the midst of this chaos, we can point the way forward with ease.
- pixl97 8mo ago
  >Would any football fan watch this? Depends what the future of VR worlds look like, and what the viewers place is in them.
- likium 8mo ago
  Football anime doesn’t involve real people or stakes. AI can introduce a storyline, characters, etc. It won't necessarily be as popular as the real sport but I doubt the audience is zero.
ane 8mo ago
I am also glad the commercial niche illustration markets like Magic the Gathering are extremely hostile to AI art, though of course I would think Wizards of the Coast, the company that publishes MTG, probably see artists as a cost. Maybe. Perhaps in the future artists will be used to train models that can output a certain style of art and the artist will receive royalties based on their influence on the trained model and its popularity.
screye 8mo ago
> The narrative/life of the artist becomes a lot more important We are 50 years into post-modernism. Can't imagine it can get any more important. I predict emergent design will be the next big thing. Czinger[1] is a great example of what it may look like. Rick Ruben-esque world, where the creator is more a guide. [1] Czinger uses stochastic optimization to converge to designs - https://www.czinger.com/iconic-design https://www.czinger.com/iconic-design
- cpill 8mo ago
  Is that what putting a camera in the hands of everyone with a smartphone (basically everyone) did for photography? Or making video editing + free, global publishing platform did for film? (see: doom scrolling).
- selridge 8mo ago
  God, thank you. Finally, someone pointing out all of this is just people announcing what has been in play for half a century.
- CamperBob2 8mo ago
  Post-modernism says that the artist isn't important. Dead, in fact. Art is something that happens when we perceive it, not when the author creates it.
scrozier 8mo ago
> Taste continues to be the single most important thing. The vast, vast majority of AI art out there is...not very good. It's not going to get better, because the lack of taste isn't a technical problem. This is precisely and importantly true. I just wonder if most of the world cares. I'd like to think so, but experience tells me that most of the world is satisfied with mediocre stuff. And I don't say this as a criticism; it's just a fact that artists have to come to grips with.
- SpaceNoodled 8mo ago
  Well, it can be both.
deleted 8mo ago
[deleted]
tlh 8mo ago
AI art is certainly considered uncool today in many circles. I do wonder though… were there other innovations that were uncool in their early years, where now nobody bats an eyelid? Is that point just a generational/passage of time issue?
- ronnier 8mo ago
  Apple AirPods.
- SpaceNoodled 8mo ago
  Photography was considered pretty uncool; it removed what at the time was perceived as all of the skill. We now can appreciate deeper aspects of captured images such as composition, and we now see painted portraits replaced by more abstract, surreal, or imagined imagery. Generative AI is similarly revolutionary in that it moves away from realism back into the realm of the imaginary; whether or not a user's prompts can be appreciated remains to be seen.
  - goobatrooba 8mo ago
    Fun fact: copyright law was invented in the UK basically because painters and sculptors (!) considered photography theft. That came to a large degree before "real" text copyright as we know it today.
    - magicalist 8mo ago
      > Fun fact: copyright law was invented in the UK basically because painters and sculptors (!) considered photography theft. That came to a large degree before "real" text copyright as we know it today. This is...not true? Or at least I can find no basis for your claims. UK Copyright for books and sculpture predated the invention of photography and existed in a completely recognizable form ("a copyright term of 14 years, with a provision for renewal for a similar term, during which only the author and the printers to whom they chose to license their works could publish the author's creations.[4] Following this, the work's copyright would expire, with the material falling into the public domain"[1]). Paintings and photographs gained copyright protection at the same time, in the 1862 Fine Arts Copyright Act, seemingly because it seemed natural to extend the haphazardly covered fine arts more completely. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Statute_of_Anne https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Statute_of_Anne
Davidzheng 8mo ago
Re: But they aren't alive, they don't live in the world and have experiences, and they can't create something truly new. Is it possible for a character in a novel to have novel experiences? Or for you to experience a novel dream? I would argue yes. You can know the rules of the environment and the starting conditions, but with a bit of randomness (or not) you can generate from that novel experiences which were unexpected - so too from the data & distribution that AIs are already trained on they can experience new experiences. Another source of novelty is from good verifiers/recognition of a class of object which is hard to construct but easy to verify - here the AI can search and from that obtain novel solutions which were unthought of before. N.B novelty itself is basically trivial - just generate random strings. But both of the above are mechanisms to generate novel samples inside some constraint of "meaningfulness"
muyuu 8mo ago
We'll get to the point, if we're not already there, where you won't be able to tell if the artist actually did the work or just could have done it, and to which extent. Everything in the process can be essentially faked. If you put a massive emphasis on proving human work, you're essentially conceding you cannot tell without some sort of notary certification. We're in the lab diamond stage and clutching at some artificial authenticity.
selridge 8mo ago
I don’t know that this has to be the way. One thing that is really going to confound this very common idea that taste and quality and personal characteristics will win the day, is that you can use AI to represent all of these to other people. It’s a huge practical problem to try and figure out authentic nature over the Internet. It’s already clear that people will pay for it, but it’s not at all clear that they will get it. If we imagine that the tools get better and more sophisticated than there is no reason whatsoever to assume that the tools won’t be deployed to give the impression that is needed to make money. I don’t think any of the above survives if we allow for AI to be used as it is currently being used. It only survives if you pretend that ahead of us is some invisible gate past which this technology will not go.
WheatMillington 8mo ago
>2. Originality matters more than ever. By design, these tools can only copy and mix things that already exist. But they aren't alive, they don't live in the world and have experiences, and they can't create something truly new. How can you say this? These models can trivially create things that have never existed, and you can easily test this yourself.
- crote 8mo ago
  Should a randomly-shuffled deck of cards be considered art? After all, the card shuffling machine created something which statistically has never existed before. Every shuffled deck should belong in a museum, right? On the other hand, prompting AI for "pelican riding on a bicycle" clearly shows that it has far more trouble with unique concepts, compared to prompting for something more cookie-cutter.
  - 7bit 8mo ago
    You and the top-level commenter fundamentally misunderstand the mechanisms behind diffusion models. They are able to create original art and are not just shuffled cards.
jpadkins 8mo ago
> 4. Taste continues to be the single most important thing. The vast, vast majority of AI art out there is...not very good. It's not going to get better, because the lack of taste isn't a technical problem. I agree on current AI art taste, but disagree that it can't be improved. I think art AI companies can hire skilled "taste makers" and use their feedback loop as RL for AI art models. I think this area will always be in flux, and will vary by subpopulation so it will be a job role always in demand. Do you think taste is something that cannot be taught/learned? Are certain individuals just born with good taste; it's an immutable property?
eboy 8mo ago
[dead]
kjeksfjes 8mo ago
My prediction: KNOWLEDGE of whether something is made by AI or a human will be alpha and omega, and will eventually be regulated used in commercial contexts. You will always be able to generate something, but if you somehow get exposed presenting it as human made, the sanctions will hurt you.
JKCalhoun 8mo ago
You're focused on the visual arts—I'll add that live music will become more treasured, sought after than recorded music. Because it's real.
hi_hi 8mo ago
This is a great and worthwhile discussion. People are loosing sight of what art is. The art is the idea, not the medium. And just because something is easy, doesn't mean it will be good. I've seen some fantastic original pictures that actual artists have generated through AI. I can't wait to see what current and future artists can do with the new tools at their disposal.
testrun 8mo ago
I think the most important is number 2. People are now looking for things that are made by humans. Most detest AI slop. And if they find out that you are peddling slop, you lost trust. It seems to me that we will go through the same phases that chess went through when chess on computers became a thing. First, people thought that this will kill chess, then people start using it as a tool to play better chess. Now, chess is thriving, despite AI being used in chess. I can see a similar path with art. Using AI to generate ideas, still create art by humans.
- crote 8mo ago
  Crucially, chest is also thriving as a spectator sport - and what's drawing the views is not the high-level matches: people are far more interested in more fast-paced and casual content, where the personality of the streamer can shine through. On the other hand, absolutely nobody is watching livestreams of two chess bots playing each other. They might technically be better at chess, but that doesn't mean it makes for entertaining content.
cgio 8mo ago
I think we fall into the trap of seeing art from a consumption point of view. “Of what use is a human vs AI piece of art to Me?” Art is residing in the productive space too, the artist is considering not his/her utility but his/her presence in the world. Maybe what you describe is the way forward for art monetisation but not for art, and we know experientially how the production of real art is not always in tandem with its appreciation.
Spacecosmonaut 8mo ago
Regarding point 2: I think most people cannot destinguish between "genuine" creativity and artificial almalgamation of training data and human provided context. For one, I do not know what already exsists. Some work created by AI may be an obvious rip off of the style of a particular artist, but I wouldnt know. To me it might look awesome and fresh. Furthermore, I think many of the more human centric thinkers will be disappointed at how many people just wont care.
throwthrowuknow 8mo ago
1. This sounds more like influencer marketing, I think people are already sick of it. 2. Yes and no. Depending on how you train the model they can output things that you’ve never seen before but the question is whether you want to look at those things. So yes a human has to judge and fine tune the output. This is why many models seem unoriginal, they’re designed to emulate specific styles and tuned based on broad appeal. If you go looking for LoRAs and merges created by “artists” you will see shit you couldn’t dream of. everything else probably yes.
maxglute 8mo ago
Everything is a remix. Humans' rarely original, creativity still built off influences. AI image generation is nothing if not good at remixing.
lofaszvanitt 8mo ago
It's a harrowing situation to watch simpleminded idiots in forums proclaim that artists, some even naming top talent, are going to be useless and that they can steal their handiwork just by naming them in prompts. And people actually dare to say this with such audacity. Those who create GenAI likely do not realize what lowlife impulses some of these individuals have. No matter how good AI agents become, you still need a general understanding of what works and what doesn't. If you don't have years of experience in the field, all you will end up doing is copying what others do. It's the same dynamic you see on OnlyFans. Mindless zombie hordes copy the "pioneers" (who shove even bigger things in their back orifice for example) and push things further and further, chasing shock value because that's what once elevated someone into the top 0.1 percent. It's the worst kind of race-to-the-bottom scenario.

avmich 8mo ago

I mostly disagree. > 1... The narrative/life of the artist becomes a lot more important. When I watch a movie, I don't care about the artist's life. I care about character life, that's very different. > 2... Originality matters more than ever. By design, these tools can only copy and mix things that already exist. It's like you assigning to humans divine capabilities :) . Hyperbolizing a little, humans also only copy and mix - where do you think originality comes from? Granted, AI isn't at the level of humans yet, but they improve here. > 4... It's not going to get better, because the lack of taste isn't a technical problem. Engineers are in business of converting non-technical problems into technical ones. Just like AI now is way more capable than it was 20 years ago, and able to write interesting texts and make interesting pictures - something which at the time wasn't considered a technical problem - with time what we perceive as "taste" may likely improve. > 5... Above all, AI art is uncool, which means it has no real future as a leading art form. AI critics are for a long time mistaking the level with trend. Or, giving a comparison with SpaceX achievements, "you're currently here" - when there was a list of "first, get to the orbit, then we'll talk", "first, start regular payload deliveries to orbit, then we'll talk", "first, land the stage... send crewed capsule... do that in numbers..." and then, currently "first, send the Starship to orbit". "You're currently here" is the always existing point which isn't achieved at the moment and which gives to critics something to point to and mount the objection to the process as a whole, because, see, this particular thing isn't achieved yet. You assume AI won't be able to make cool art with time. AI critics were shown time and time again to be underestimating the possibilities. Some people find it hard to learn in some particular topics.

jplusequalt 8mo ago
>Engineers are in business of converting non-technical problems into technical ones. Art is not a problem to be solved.
- tmountain 8mo ago
  Art is a reaction to life. AI is thereby incapable of producing anything with any degree of authenticity unless it conveys the experience of being an agent to the world.
  - avmich 8mo ago
    Two comments here. First, "AI is thereby incapable" is a hypothesis, not a fact - how would you prove that you have to "live" to produce art? You might feel this way, you may suggest some correlations here - but can you really prove that? Second, I don't see impossibility for AI to be - to various degrees - an agent to the world. I think that's already happening actually - they are interacting with world even today, in some limited sense, through our computers and networks, and - today - not many of them actually "learn" from those interactions. But we're in the early days of this - I suspect.
  - ACCount37 8mo ago
    What is AI if not "a reaction to life"? With how much data goes into the frontier systems, and how much of it gets captured by them, an AI might have, in many ways, a richer grasp of human experience than the humans themselves do. You were only ever one human. An LLM has skimmed from millions. You have seen a tree, and the AI has seen the forest it stands in.
    - jplusequalt 8mo ago
      The AI has not "seen" or "experienced" anything, as it's not a sentient life form.
    - tmountain 8mo ago
      It’s a subjective conversation but putting AI in the same category as a real artist is like saying someone that’s played a ton of first person shooters has gone to war. It might have a lot of observed information about what is involved in living, but real art comes from a lived experience, just like reading about going to Hawaii doesn’t mean you’ve been to Hawaii. Making something authentic requires synthesizing your life experience with the message you want to convey, and personalizing it in a way that puts an imprint of yourself into the work. Sure, it can render beautiful imagery, but I am speaking to a different issue entirely, and I don’t see any way that it can create in the way I am describing.

bjackman 8mo ago

> The narrative/life of the artist becomes a lot more important. Less the narrative of the art's production and more the message that it's conveying. I don't mean (necessarily) a political message or a message that can be put in to words. But the abstract sense of connecting with the human who created it some way. This isn't just art though. An example: soon, Sora will be able to generate very convincing footage of a football match. Would any football fan watch this? No. A big part of why we watch football is that in some sense we care about the people who are playing. Same with visual art. AI art can be cool but in the end, I just don't really give a shit. Coz enjoying art is usually about the abstract sense that a human person decided to make the thing you are looking at, and now you are looking at it... And now what? This is why every time someone says "AI art sucks" and someone replies "oh yeah? But look at THIS AI art" I always wonder... What do you think art is _for_?

selridge 8mo ago
The problem is, we have no real understanding of what people will or will not do with this technology. Will humans only be interested in “real“ activity? We have no idea, and most people are just guessing in a way that flatters some understanding of art that they have. We also frankly have no idea what the permanent relationship of humans to art is even without AI. The television is less than 100 years old. There aren’t very many, but there are some people alive today who were alive before the television was created. The computer is about 80 years old. The whole idea of photography and of recorded audio is less uthan 150 years old. We are still living in the aftershocks of industrial production of art. It is foolish to imagine that in the midst of this chaos, we can point the way forward with ease.
pixl97 8mo ago
>Would any football fan watch this? Depends what the future of VR worlds look like, and what the viewers place is in them.
likium 8mo ago
Football anime doesn’t involve real people or stakes. AI can introduce a storyline, characters, etc. It won't necessarily be as popular as the real sport but I doubt the audience is zero.

ane 8mo ago

I am also glad the commercial niche illustration markets like Magic the Gathering are extremely hostile to AI art, though of course I would think Wizards of the Coast, the company that publishes MTG, probably see artists as a cost. Maybe. Perhaps in the future artists will be used to train models that can output a certain style of art and the artist will receive royalties based on their influence on the trained model and its popularity.

screye 8mo ago

> The narrative/life of the artist becomes a lot more important We are 50 years into post-modernism. Can't imagine it can get any more important. I predict emergent design will be the next big thing. Czinger[1] is a great example of what it may look like. Rick Ruben-esque world, where the creator is more a guide. [1] Czinger uses stochastic optimization to converge to designs - https://www.czinger.com/iconic-design https://www.czinger.com/iconic-design

cpill 8mo ago
Is that what putting a camera in the hands of everyone with a smartphone (basically everyone) did for photography? Or making video editing + free, global publishing platform did for film? (see: doom scrolling).
selridge 8mo ago
God, thank you. Finally, someone pointing out all of this is just people announcing what has been in play for half a century.
CamperBob2 8mo ago
Post-modernism says that the artist isn't important. Dead, in fact. Art is something that happens when we perceive it, not when the author creates it.

scrozier 8mo ago

> Taste continues to be the single most important thing. The vast, vast majority of AI art out there is...not very good. It's not going to get better, because the lack of taste isn't a technical problem. This is precisely and importantly true. I just wonder if most of the world cares. I'd like to think so, but experience tells me that most of the world is satisfied with mediocre stuff. And I don't say this as a criticism; it's just a fact that artists have to come to grips with.

SpaceNoodled 8mo ago
Well, it can be both.

deleted 8mo ago

[deleted]

tlh 8mo ago

AI art is certainly considered uncool today in many circles. I do wonder though… were there other innovations that were uncool in their early years, where now nobody bats an eyelid? Is that point just a generational/passage of time issue?

ronnier 8mo ago
Apple AirPods.
SpaceNoodled 8mo ago
Photography was considered pretty uncool; it removed what at the time was perceived as all of the skill. We now can appreciate deeper aspects of captured images such as composition, and we now see painted portraits replaced by more abstract, surreal, or imagined imagery. Generative AI is similarly revolutionary in that it moves away from realism back into the realm of the imaginary; whether or not a user's prompts can be appreciated remains to be seen.
- goobatrooba 8mo ago
  Fun fact: copyright law was invented in the UK basically because painters and sculptors (!) considered photography theft. That came to a large degree before "real" text copyright as we know it today.
  - magicalist 8mo ago
    > Fun fact: copyright law was invented in the UK basically because painters and sculptors (!) considered photography theft. That came to a large degree before "real" text copyright as we know it today. This is...not true? Or at least I can find no basis for your claims. UK Copyright for books and sculpture predated the invention of photography and existed in a completely recognizable form ("a copyright term of 14 years, with a provision for renewal for a similar term, during which only the author and the printers to whom they chose to license their works could publish the author's creations.[4] Following this, the work's copyright would expire, with the material falling into the public domain"[1]). Paintings and photographs gained copyright protection at the same time, in the 1862 Fine Arts Copyright Act, seemingly because it seemed natural to extend the haphazardly covered fine arts more completely. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Statute_of_Anne https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Statute_of_Anne

Davidzheng 8mo ago

Re: But they aren't alive, they don't live in the world and have experiences, and they can't create something truly new. Is it possible for a character in a novel to have novel experiences? Or for you to experience a novel dream? I would argue yes. You can know the rules of the environment and the starting conditions, but with a bit of randomness (or not) you can generate from that novel experiences which were unexpected - so too from the data & distribution that AIs are already trained on they can experience new experiences. Another source of novelty is from good verifiers/recognition of a class of object which is hard to construct but easy to verify - here the AI can search and from that obtain novel solutions which were unthought of before. N.B novelty itself is basically trivial - just generate random strings. But both of the above are mechanisms to generate novel samples inside some constraint of "meaningfulness"

muyuu 8mo ago

We'll get to the point, if we're not already there, where you won't be able to tell if the artist actually did the work or just could have done it, and to which extent. Everything in the process can be essentially faked. If you put a massive emphasis on proving human work, you're essentially conceding you cannot tell without some sort of notary certification. We're in the lab diamond stage and clutching at some artificial authenticity.

selridge 8mo ago

I don’t know that this has to be the way. One thing that is really going to confound this very common idea that taste and quality and personal characteristics will win the day, is that you can use AI to represent all of these to other people. It’s a huge practical problem to try and figure out authentic nature over the Internet. It’s already clear that people will pay for it, but it’s not at all clear that they will get it. If we imagine that the tools get better and more sophisticated than there is no reason whatsoever to assume that the tools won’t be deployed to give the impression that is needed to make money. I don’t think any of the above survives if we allow for AI to be used as it is currently being used. It only survives if you pretend that ahead of us is some invisible gate past which this technology will not go.

WheatMillington 8mo ago

>2. Originality matters more than ever. By design, these tools can only copy and mix things that already exist. But they aren't alive, they don't live in the world and have experiences, and they can't create something truly new. How can you say this? These models can trivially create things that have never existed, and you can easily test this yourself.

crote 8mo ago
Should a randomly-shuffled deck of cards be considered art? After all, the card shuffling machine created something which statistically has never existed before. Every shuffled deck should belong in a museum, right? On the other hand, prompting AI for "pelican riding on a bicycle" clearly shows that it has far more trouble with unique concepts, compared to prompting for something more cookie-cutter.
- 7bit 8mo ago
  You and the top-level commenter fundamentally misunderstand the mechanisms behind diffusion models. They are able to create original art and are not just shuffled cards.

jpadkins 8mo ago

> 4. Taste continues to be the single most important thing. The vast, vast majority of AI art out there is...not very good. It's not going to get better, because the lack of taste isn't a technical problem. I agree on current AI art taste, but disagree that it can't be improved. I think art AI companies can hire skilled "taste makers" and use their feedback loop as RL for AI art models. I think this area will always be in flux, and will vary by subpopulation so it will be a job role always in demand. Do you think taste is something that cannot be taught/learned? Are certain individuals just born with good taste; it's an immutable property?

eboy 8mo ago

[dead]

kjeksfjes 8mo ago

My prediction: KNOWLEDGE of whether something is made by AI or a human will be alpha and omega, and will eventually be regulated used in commercial contexts. You will always be able to generate something, but if you somehow get exposed presenting it as human made, the sanctions will hurt you.

JKCalhoun 8mo ago

You're focused on the visual arts—I'll add that live music will become more treasured, sought after than recorded music. Because it's real.

hi_hi 8mo ago

This is a great and worthwhile discussion. People are loosing sight of what art is. The art is the idea, not the medium. And just because something is easy, doesn't mean it will be good. I've seen some fantastic original pictures that actual artists have generated through AI. I can't wait to see what current and future artists can do with the new tools at their disposal.

testrun 8mo ago

I think the most important is number 2. People are now looking for things that are made by humans. Most detest AI slop. And if they find out that you are peddling slop, you lost trust. It seems to me that we will go through the same phases that chess went through when chess on computers became a thing. First, people thought that this will kill chess, then people start using it as a tool to play better chess. Now, chess is thriving, despite AI being used in chess. I can see a similar path with art. Using AI to generate ideas, still create art by humans.

crote 8mo ago
Crucially, chest is also thriving as a spectator sport - and what's drawing the views is not the high-level matches: people are far more interested in more fast-paced and casual content, where the personality of the streamer can shine through. On the other hand, absolutely nobody is watching livestreams of two chess bots playing each other. They might technically be better at chess, but that doesn't mean it makes for entertaining content.

cgio 8mo ago

I think we fall into the trap of seeing art from a consumption point of view. “Of what use is a human vs AI piece of art to Me?” Art is residing in the productive space too, the artist is considering not his/her utility but his/her presence in the world. Maybe what you describe is the way forward for art monetisation but not for art, and we know experientially how the production of real art is not always in tandem with its appreciation.

Spacecosmonaut 8mo ago

Regarding point 2: I think most people cannot destinguish between "genuine" creativity and artificial almalgamation of training data and human provided context. For one, I do not know what already exsists. Some work created by AI may be an obvious rip off of the style of a particular artist, but I wouldnt know. To me it might look awesome and fresh. Furthermore, I think many of the more human centric thinkers will be disappointed at how many people just wont care.

throwthrowuknow 8mo ago

1. This sounds more like influencer marketing, I think people are already sick of it. 2. Yes and no. Depending on how you train the model they can output things that you’ve never seen before but the question is whether you want to look at those things. So yes a human has to judge and fine tune the output. This is why many models seem unoriginal, they’re designed to emulate specific styles and tuned based on broad appeal. If you go looking for LoRAs and merges created by “artists” you will see shit you couldn’t dream of. everything else probably yes.

maxglute 8mo ago

Everything is a remix. Humans' rarely original, creativity still built off influences. AI image generation is nothing if not good at remixing.

lofaszvanitt 8mo ago

It's a harrowing situation to watch simpleminded idiots in forums proclaim that artists, some even naming top talent, are going to be useless and that they can steal their handiwork just by naming them in prompts. And people actually dare to say this with such audacity. Those who create GenAI likely do not realize what lowlife impulses some of these individuals have. No matter how good AI agents become, you still need a general understanding of what works and what doesn't. If you don't have years of experience in the field, all you will end up doing is copying what others do. It's the same dynamic you see on OnlyFans. Mindless zombie hordes copy the "pioneers" (who shove even bigger things in their back orifice for example) and push things further and further, chasing shock value because that's what once elevated someone into the top 0.1 percent. It's the worst kind of race-to-the-bottom scenario.