Setting aside the usual arguments on the anti- and pro-AI art debate and the nature of creativity itself, perhaps the negative reaction that the Redditor encountered is part of a sea change in opinion among many people that think corporate AI platforms are exploitive and extractive in nature because their datasets rely on copyrighted material without the original artists’ permission. And that’s without getting into AI’s negative drag on the environment.
people forget that what makes art impressive is also the skill of the artist in the respective medium
if someone creates a perfect color gradient fill in Photoshop nobody is going to be impressed but make it with colored pencils and people may regard it as stunning
the beauty is also in the effort it took to create, not only in what the result looks like - i don’t need to take time to look at stuff people didn’t take time to make
if someone creates a perfect color gradient fill in Photoshop nobody is going to be impressed but make it with colored pencils and people may regard it as stunning
Funnily enough, that was what Mark Rothko was doing with paint. Exploring color to get the perfect shade of something. Looking at color at its most basic. That’s why those of us who understand what Rothko was going for often really love his paintings while most other people say, “I don’t get it, it’s just rectangles.”
Oh I do get it but it’s still just rectangles. If the only people who like your stuff are other painters, not other artists in general but other painters, then I think it’s fair to say that what you’re doing is 99.99% craft and maybe 0.01% art.
That kind of stuff also exists in an AI context, btw, people doing things for the heck of getting it to work and showing off technical aspects. Like absolutely a milestone when it comes to video2video, absolutely at a stage where it’s usable for artistic expression if you’re willing to work within some limitations, though the video here is much more dicking around than art. You’ll also find gazillions of AIified tiktok dances from the same crowd as tracking limbs isn’t exactly trivial.
But it isn’t “just rectangles.” That’s the point. They were slowly and meticulously constructed by layering oil paint in a way that explores the idea of what colors and color contrasts mean.
He didn’t just take a broad paintbrush and paint a rectangle.
He also suggested viewing his canvases up close, maybe a foot away, so you could see it the way he saw it.
With less skill in painting but the same artistic intent I can take a sample book of unicolour fabric with different weaves from the local textile store and put it on a pedestal: Exploring the idea of what fabric texture and texture contrasts mean.
And I’m sure clothing designers all over the world will be ecstatic… or would be, if they didn’t have store rooms full of sample books.
It is a valuable and thorough exploration of the craft is all I’m saying. He’s a Paganini, not a Ravel.
But why isn’t such an exploration a form of art?
If someone does a complicated abstract painting but uses a ruler and a protractor to achieve it, is that art?
Because I make a distinction between art and craft. You can produce extraordinarily impressive pieces of craft that have no artistic content at all, no intent nor capacity to convey a message or transform mind or anything that resembles it, you can produce extraordinary pieces of art with zero recourse to craft. Like putting a urinal on a pedestal, as I’ve mentioned quite often in this thread.
Speaking about protractors: Engineering drawings can actually be art. There’s a difference between a drawing that’s merely conveying technical information and one that is both technical and at the same time is arranged, presented, such that it does not have to be deciphered, it is capable of transforming a mind by merely being looked at, instead of having to be pondered. It’s the difference between a court file and a thrilling detective story.
So you’re claiming any image that must be deciphered isn’t art?
Here is an alternative Piped link(s):
absolutely a milestone when it comes to video2video
Piped is a privacy-respecting open-source alternative frontend to YouTube.
I’m open-source; check me out at GitHub.
Respectfully disagree. There’s a plethora of artists with exceptional skills that create photorealistic art in several mediums. While the process takes an inordinate amount of time it is completely devoid of any creative input. These are essentially human xerox machines that match color values from a photo using the naked eye. The skill is impressive, the art: not so much.
Isn’t that what the person you replied just said?
No. The person I replied to was exclusively praising skill and emphasizing its relevance to the final product. I pointed out that effort does not by default result in an original or creative product. OP dismisses effort and equates time with quality. Take for instance japanese calligraphy: the master places only a handful of strokes to render something gorgeous. On the other hand, someone could spend 80 hours meticulously recreating a photorealistic portrait in watercolor but it’s just a human xerox at that point. The human element is completely missed.
They didn’t say that though? The last paragraph made it clear (to me) that they were saying the end result isn’t the only part of at that makes it impressive, but also the effort/skill involved
I guess you’re right. I suppose this last phrase threw me off:
- i don’t need to take time to look at stuff people didn’t take time to make
The way I read it this statement stands apart from the rest of their comment. Skill is nice–I agree–but I stand by my original statement: time or effort does not by default result in an artistic product. I suppose I could have read it wrong in that the comment as a whole is a bit disjointed.
I always hated that the most upvoted art on reddit was just photorealism… Abd then the comments were all like, “Wow! I was 100% sure this was a photo until i zoom in!!!”
Yeah I agree, but with large platforms it’s inevitable for tastes to converge towards the median. A Rothko wouldn’t even register on such a platform.
I think Rothko probably doesn’t look as impressive on a phone screen either, compared to real life
This is because different people enjoy different things about art. Some people see it as a connection, hearing another person’s voice in the piece. Some love to see sacrifice, like spending hundreds of hours on creating something. Some view it almost like a sport and want to see a display of pinnacle skill. Others want the art to connect with them and their past.
people forget that what makes art impressive is also the skill of the artist in the respective medium
I bet you don’t like it when people put urinals on a pedestal.
the beauty is also in the effort it took to create
While I support your whole statement, I think the beauty of art lies in the message, vision or emotion that the artist wants to convey to the world through a visual medium. You can have a super realistic portrayal of a human and still prefer the art of Van Gogh because he shared his emotions through his art and people could feel that.
there was an ‘also’ in that sentence - and he put it there himself without leveraging other bathroom-installations-on-pedestal works
He put it there leveraging a whole urinal factory. Transported into today’s world, instead of clicking “generate” on a prompt with “urinal” on it he put “urinal” in the amazon search box, picked the first result, and then hit “buy”.
The art is in the idea, the message, the thought or impression that’s getting transmitted, the effect in the recipient’s mind (in this case it was a shitpost to troll conservatives on the one side and have a good chuckle among people who got it on the other). The rest is craft. Craft, on its own, can be fucking impressive but it’s not art.
And, of course, yes, not everyone hitting “generate” is putting a urinal on a pedestal. Much of the AI stuff out there is devoid of artistic intent, much of it isn’t even crafty, but that doesn’t mean that something being AI generated cannot be art, or that it would need craftiness to become art.
In the case of his bicycle wheel thing he went through a gazillion wheels – hitting generate a million times if you want – until he found one that was neither beautiful, nor ugly, but one that was profoundly uninteresting, “just a wheel, nothing special”. That was work, the actual work of an artist (judging the impression something makes), and with precise artistic intent – to make a statement about how art should be about engaging the mind, be not about aesthetics.
The people producing profoundly uninteresting works with AI don’t do that. Just goes on to show that the author is very much not dead.
Until one can produce work that makes an impression with some precision one has to have experience in the medium though - and different media are different regarding to what that means.
With illustration and representative art it starts with something ‘reading’ correctly, i.e. whether the intended representation even gets to the recipient. And then there are more layers on top of that getting ever more meta.
Someone who can put a urinal on a pedestal and cause an uproar in whichever direction has a lot of experience - but if a picture is just a picture or a urinal is just a urinal, it’s not worth looking at much, except for its engineering. Good art doesn’t have to be on that level though, entertainment can also be good art (but a lot of it isn’t) - there, it’s about resonance.
You’re right that craftsmanship alone cannot produce good art, there is something else driving the desire to hone craftsmanship, which is maybe to better be able to express what was impressed on the artist through life. Something that resonates with the artist is made with the hope it also resonates with other people, art is a social endeavour.
But I also feel that to a large extent, honing the craft also hones the intuition (and some knowledge as far as it can be distilled) for what makes things resonant with others. I make myself into the diffusion model to resonate with what I’m making while making it, you feel each curve you put to paper or canvas, you feel the tension in a pose, the impact of a composition - the resulting art is what’s there when that process is abandoned.
I feel like a vegan about the currently available models - once there is something made from public domain art only I’ll experiment. But right now I’m sitting in front of them like a vegan in front of sausage: For others the result is food but for them, they just see the process turning individuals into sausage.
But I also feel that to a large extent, honing the craft also hones the intuition (and some knowledge as far as it can be distilled) for what makes things resonant with others.
Oh, definitely. I’d also say that if you want to make art, starting out with AI isn’t a good idea, do literally anything else until you have developed an artistic eye: If for no other reason that it is developed faster by trying to appease even an underdeveloped one than by using it. Just to make this a bit more concrete, if you can sculpt or paint a smile that doesn’t look freaky which is a low bar aesthetically speaking but not trivial for a beginner sculptor or painter, then you can properly judge whether what AI is giving you is something resonant, or forgettable. The untrained eye putting “woman with big tiddies” in the prompt certainly isn’t going to notice finer details of a smile, what with eyes being on the tits.
I feel like a vegan about the currently available models - once there is something made from public domain art only I’ll experiment. But right now I’m sitting in front of them like a vegan in front of sausage: For others the result is food but for them, they just see the process turning individuals into sausage.
I don’t consider models learning from stuff, as in, the pixels can be accessed without a paywall or they’ve paid for that wall, as infringement. If it was then every artist who ever used reference should be in prison, and we shouldn’t.
Note that this is actually quite a different situation in diffusion models than it is with LLMs which are notorious for returning their training data verbatim: All the NYT needed to do to get their articles back is to put in the first paragraph of the article. Getty, meanwhile, is arguing their court case in the abstract because they can’t get models to reproduce their images, certainly not for lack of trying or resources. When working with the models it also quickly becomes apparent that they can abstract over concepts.
At the most it’s the difference between organic and barn eggs. Yes, organic ones are nicer. No, barn eggs aren’t terrible (depending on local regulations etc. yadayada). Vegans might disagree but, then, well, I’m flexi.
i wonder if the people downvoting you even understand the reference
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I just need to press a button and my DSLR will automatically upload the picture I took. Is photography art? Different people get different things from art. If you want to see something that took a human a hundred hours of consideration, that’s fine. But I don’t care what the artist was thinking most of the time. I care how it makes me feel. What inspiration it sparks in my mind. I’ve been moved and inspired by AI art. Admittedly I could also probably have been moved by inkblots. But people hang inkblot prints in their house because it does something for them. Art is subjective, meaning it’s more about the subject viewing it than the artist.
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You caused me no distress, I was just inspired by your comment to share my perspective.
If a machine isn’t an athlete for throwing a football, there are no athletes. If a computer can’t be a musician, there are no musicians. The line you’re drawing where a computer is worthy of being called an artist, is whether or not it was created by evolution. But there’s no technical differences between the two. Or at least there won’t be soon.
I understand you’re under a different opinion and I thank you for it. I have no need to change it.
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Typically, I don’t find anything offensive about the images ai creates. What I do take issue with is the outlandish claims of artistic ownership because they strung some words together.
Agreed. Consider this absolutely batshit take from the reddit post linked in the article.
Your art looks pretty good, so most people wouldn’t be able to tell it’s AI unless you told them it’s AI.
Generally it’s always best to just lie and tell everyone you made it yourself, just to avoid all the toxic people that hate AI, because not having to read hateful comments from people like that is reason enough to lie. Don’t need to provide any evidence or go into details, just tell everyone you made it yourself and ignore anyone that question it.
“Your art”. I’m sure clicking the “regenerate” button on mid journey for 5 hours took lots of work. It’s hard not to feel real hate for these people.
I mean I agree that AI is stolen because of its basis and all, but the 5 hours weren’t just hitting regenerate, they were likely consisting of changing extensive parameters and such. Have you seen the insanely long prompts people write that are only half comprehensible?
Whether the stuff is art is questionable, effort did go in though
That’s fair. I’ll admit I’ve not done it myself, I’ve only seen folks talking about it – and of the people I personally know that have done it, the activity has been described as clicking regenerate until you like the results.
Yeah I’m pretty against AI art as a replacement for human art, and for it’s job destroying potential, but I have friends who play around with local models, and their setup reminds me visual programming, where you move blocks of logic around.
That’s probably ComfyUI, one of the more popular open source tools. You are right, it is visual programming. Mixing text, reference images, and a lot of other items into models to output images. I can easily see someone spending hours to get a single image out of it, but then it becomes a bit of a reusable pipeline. It’s a cool tool, and, if as someone else in this comment chain said that art is a study of choice, then the output is arguably art. I’m not sure I’d go that far with it, but I have a hard time calling my programming art as well, although it meets most of the definitions of it, and is certainly a creative act.
you’re all hung up on ownership. IP is completely a result of capitalism. no one would care who used their images if we weren’t all struggling to survive in a post scarcity world. the problem isn’t AI, it’s the people that own this shit and insist that the world cling to these outdated ideas of ownership. I use AI in my art all the time. I’m an artist with 40 years of experience. I have no problem with it.
Quit bitching about AI and start dismantling capitalism (by any means necessary).
One of the saddest things I’ve seen on Lemmy is that while people here generally have sensible left wing opinions on things (the tankies aside), as soon as AI is brought up in any context most of the users seem to transform in to pearl clutching petite bourgeoisie.
What is bourgeoisie about being against AI art?
The bit where people all of a sudden become obsessed with owning intellectual property and generating passive income from it (royalties) and value people being able to monetise cultural artefacts rather than allow them to contribute to the common good.
The people “obsessed” with it are, by and large, independent and industry artists who are already struggling financially and most are definitely not making any money from royalties. They very often post their art in public spaces where they are free to view, or in Pateron for a few bucks a month. Certainly the outcry is against all of those public (but still copyrighted) works that were used to train models.
The people “obsessed” with it are, by and large, independent and industry artists
I’m not sure that’s true unless Lemmy has an incredibly strange community of whom a significant proportion are tech focused professional artists. But regardless the point I’m making is more about the mindset where people become vociferous defenders of an unjust system that benefits large corporations because they are fighting for the few scraps that they get out of it, rather than considering alternatives.
Theres a lot of nuance that exists here.
There are many consumer apps based on stable diffusion where people just type what they want “astronaut sitting on a horse” most work is below the hud and therefor i agree with your sentiment, asking something isn’t a creative process. The results is usually decent but rarely amazing but anyone can recreate it with the right prompt and seed
But things change quickly when you use proper tools like comfyui where you get full control of what the tech can do. Not all models play well with plain descriptions and prompts start to resemble a lengthy magical spell of keywords that become unreadable to a human being. Some keywords perform consistently but are highly counter-intuitive but they only work with some models and settings.
Then there are all the modifiers that change the weights and interpretation of the prompt, latent information, customize noise generations. Mix/matching multiples models iterating on the same picture, using custom or native vae, clip skip 0, 1 or 2…
During the process of changing things the results are usually utter crap but the more you understand what your doing the closer you will get to a workflow that can consistently output good images.
A last step is taking the parameters/seed that generated best pictures from a batch and editing the prompt/settings further to fix the last details.
The process is a creative one and the result is impossible to recreate without someone knowing exactly all the steps involved so here i would say artistic ownership can be applied.
I like naunce so I do appreciate your post. I dream of a world where AI can assist all sorts of creatives bringing their imagination to life so they can share their inner world with others. If we go back to my OP, though, I stuck that word outlandish in there purposefully. Often these AI artist will have some hokey back story where you know they are attributing the AI’s creativity as their own.
I’ve never found an AI image itself offensive. It’s people shortcutting for profit and clout that irks me.
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Thats an unfair comparison. Were not talking about “painters” or “illustrators” but using the very general term “artist”
I literally started by saying i agree that just asking sm premade like bing to generate x with y isnt making art.
But there can be deep creative processes involved in getting an ai to generate just right and any actual professionals i do know use AI will more often then not use photoshop edits as parts of their process. The ai is a tool.
If you are intentionally using creative process to create an imagined output then you are by dictionary definition an artist.
Stable diffusion is also much more a technology then a product, anyone with a decent gpu can train their own models and many people have. Using someone elses models is no different then using someone else’s brushes in a painting program because what counts is what you do with it, which often involves alot more then just typing in a prompt.
If you want some examples of the creative freedom and complexity one can get just search for “comfyui workflow”
In your sport example, if you managed to step for step guide and train a basic robot (so not a toy preconfigured to play sports)into properly playing sports you wouldn’t perse fit the dictionary for an athlete but you having the knowledge to do this could create a reasonable assumption that you are. Otherwise i would say amateur-engineer could also apply because you probably need to know a lot about how the robot joints function. At the very least i would call you an artist because it would take a lot of creative trial and error to pull off.
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Well that’s very interesting for me personally to think about. Thanks for bringing this up.
I always really enjoyed programming but i hated being a developer.
Ive always loved making art but objectively suck at painting, not great at drawing while i am pretty good with computers, i’ve long realized i can use that to scratch my creative itch as opposed to traditional tools. I have dabbled in 3d modeling, scripting, creating custom theming, general indie game development but my real long time dream is opening a workshop where i reconfigure old hardware into cool looking contraptions operating silly programs that serve no practical use besides inspiring joy.
When i worked as a developer i was assigned a task and told to program x or y within z limits and standards. I had no creative freedom and really hated that job for that reason.
i guess when it comes to how i work with ai its fair to compare it to being a programmer much more then a conventional painter, it definitely taps into my technical insight on a similar level, but it does much more then scripting scratch my very real itch to create things.
On principle I’ve always been very openminded to what art can be, a literal toilet can be art so i also considered that the thoughts of a philosopher are art. Writing is art, cooking can be art, Video games are art.
Its absolutely ok to make distinctions yourself, if art is anything at all it is subjective but i hope you can see that following my logic i don’t see why my creative projects wouldn’t count towards the definition.
Everyone who has written a book: “HEY!”
Brief description = book
TIL
Imagine if anyone who commissioned a piece of artwork took sole credit for that art.
You’re a blast at parties, I’m sure
Sure, because as someone with social anxiety I can tell you all I ever dream of is going to parties.
Mood
All it takes to write a book is to string some words together?
Flagpole masonry tick Persepolis a reciprocity.
I’m an author!
See, now you’re getting it!
You are. A crappy one, but you’re an author. Try to do better.
Gatekeeping words like “artist” and “author” is very nasty. My 3 year old makes art. He’s bad at it but if I tell him he’s not an artist he’ll stop and who knows what could have happened. I choose to encourage him.
He also write like you did. And I encourage him to do better.
I don’t think saying “if you put random words together with no context, you’re not an author” is gatekeeping. It’s defining a term.
And I absolutely gatekeep the idea that anyone’s three-year-old is an artist or an author. Those are things that take skill.
My friend always said “if you can’t see it live with instruments it’s not music and they’re not musicians” and I disagreed with that for the same reason I disagree with you saying making art takes skills. I hope that makes sense. Making good art and popular art might take skill, but anyone can be an artist, anyone can be an author. “Anyone can cook.”
We can agree to disagree.
So a person who picks up a saxophone for the very first time is a musician? Really?
Sure, why not. Art teachers always defined art as the expression of an idea, and playing the saxophone for the first time is definitely that. Talent, time, skill and knowledge does not enter in this label as far as I’m concerned.
Now you’re not John Zorn but, hey, maybe you’ll be later with some perseverance and dedication. Edit: Or maybe you’ll become Duke Silver and you’ll be happy enough doing that. We need both in the world.
I disagree with the other poster, I’d say your child is an artist making maybe the purest form of art in the world, taking their life experience and putting it to paper. I’d dare to say that letting them type out a random prompt and getting a decent image out of their limited vocabulary would be much less impactful than the most crude stick figure drawing of the two of you together.
“I feel like a lot of the anti-AI people just… want there to be less beautiful art in the world,” one Redditor replied in the same thread.
The beauty of, what, mutations caused by a nuclear accident?
This was the craziest quote to me:
“I hope someday being anti-AI is seen as ableist,” another mused.
WHAT.
Just…FUCKIN WHAT.
These people just want to be able to sell their AI art alongside other artists, because they “spent 6 hours to get only 5 images” is obviously on par with someone who has spent years honing their skills and craft the create art on a canvas or other blank medium.
Some AI art is pretty interesting, but let’s not equate it being the same as someone with actual creative talent.
Yeah like also, if you’re doing art for validation – you’re not doing art.
Is everyone who posts anything online just looking for validation?
Some of them are also looking for money.
This is maybe the must frustrating argument I’ve seen, there are TONS of artists with disabilities work within their limitations to create art that is utterly unique and representative of their physical and mental struggles and triumphs.
Funny, just this morning I woke up to someone commenting on one of my pieces of art that I’d posted on Reddit that if I hadn’t put in the comment how I did it, they’d have thought it was an AI generated picture.
It’s super-painful to be a technologist and an artist at the same time right now because there are way too many people in tech who have no understanding of what it means to create art. There’s people in the art community who don’t really get AI either, of course, but since they are trending towards probably the right opinion based on an incomplete understanding of what the things we see as AI actually are, it’s much easier to listen to them. If anything, the artists can labor under the misapprehension that the current crop of AI tools are doing more than they actually are.
In the golden age of analog photography, people would do a print and include the raw borders of the image. So you’d see sprocket holes if it’s 35mm film or a variety of rough boundaries for other film formats. And it was a known artistic convention that you were showing exactly what you shot, no cropping, no edits, etc. The early first version of Instagram decided that those film borders meant “art” so of course they added the fake film borders and it grated on my nerves because I think it was the edges from a roll of Velvia, which is a brilliant color slide film. And then someone would have the photo with the B&W filter because that also means “art” but you would never see a B&W Velvia shot unless you were working really hard on a thing. So this is far from the first time that a bunch of clueless people on the tech side of the fence did something silly out of ego and ignorance.
The picture I posted is the result of a bunch of work on fabbing, 3D printing, FastLED programming, photographic technique, providing an interesting concept to a person and an existing body of work such that said person would want to show up to some random eccentric’s place for a shoot, et al. And, well… captions on art exist for a reason, right? It adds layers to the work to know that the artist was half-mad when they painted it and maybe you can tell by the painting’s brushwork or just know your art history really well but maybe you can’t and so a caption helps create context for people not skilled in that particular art.
And, there’s not really “secrets” in art. Lots of curators and art critics will take great pains to explain why Jackson Pollock or Mark Rothko so if you are still wandering around saying “BUT IT LOOKS LIKE GIANT SQUARES” that’s intentional ignorance.
Now, I’ve been exploring my particular weird genre of art for a while now. Before AI, Photoshop was the thing. Much in the same way as I could have thrown a long enough prompt into a spicy-autocomplete image generator, I also could have probably photoshopped it. Then again, the tutorials for the Photoshop version of the technique all refer back to the actual photographic effect.
Describing something as it’s not has long been a violation of social norms that people who are stuck in a world of intentional ignorance, ego, and disrespect for the artistic process have engaged in. In the simultaneous heyday of Second Life and Flickr, people wanting to treat their Second Life as their primary life caused Flickr to create features so people could mediate this boundary. So, on one level, this isn’t entirely new and posting AI art in the painting reddit is no different from posting filtered Second Life to the portrait group on flickr. It’s simple rudeness of the sort that the unglamorous aspects of community moderation are there to solve for.
I have gotten quizzed about how I make my art, but I’ve never seen anybody go off and then create a replica of my art, they’ve always gone off and created something new and novel and interesting and you might not even realize that what got them there was tricks I shared with them it’s so different. Artists don’t see other art in the gallery and autocomplete art that looks like what they saw, they incorporate ideas into their own work with their own flair.
Thus, there’s more going on than just mere rudeness. I’ve been doing this for a long time now and the AI companies have a habit of misrepresenting exactly what content they have stolen to train their image models. So it’s entirely likely that the cool AI picture that someone thinks my art looks like is really just autocompleted using parts of my art. Except I can’t say “no” and if there was a market for people making art that looks roughly like mine, I’d offer paid workshops or something.
Well now I want to see some of your work. It sounds interesting as hell
Well, the photo in question is: https://www.flickr.com/photos/cyberspace/53570370332/
Not to be off topic… but… Your username… wirehead… its dark and disturbing and absolutely i love it!
We, the people who all roughly simultaneously chose the same name at roughly the same time only to engage in endless wars over who gets it on a new site, actually exist in a diverse multi-gendered animal-loving book-reading population, of which I am only one example, merely the member of our tribe who happened to nab it here. I’ve actually talked with other Wireheads and the similarities are interesting.
All I know is that it somehow appeared in my brain before I read the Niven book that introduced it to me. And, also, at this point in history, I find Niven and many people who operated in his orbit deeply disgusting and disturbing examples of humanity, so it’s good that I came up with it on my own.
Which is funny cuz I’ve seen better ai art generated in 10 min on my laptop via CPU trained ai. Why is your photo you generated any more valid than the pic I generated? It isn’t. We both did the same thing. We used a machine to make art.
You’re really just pissed because mines better.
Also only llms are trained on web content and it is not stealing under any definition of the word. Their AI just looked at work presented online for free like any other not or user. None of that is illegal. Using the training data to recreate similar works is also not illegal as of right now.
Asking a computer to create an image is fundamentally different from constructing a scene and photographing it. One is using a machine, skill, talent and creativity to create art. The other is having a machine generate art for you.
Do you think art is maybe more about the process of creating and physically manifesting your thoughts and emotions? Like maybe art isn’t just about the end product but the joy of creation?
If you think this debate is about which one is “better” you have fundamentally missed the point. Disregarding the AI aspect entirely, art is subjective. “Better” is completely meaningless in that context. Is it more technically proficient? Better composed? Even if answers match, it could be for entirely different reasons between people. And then there are people who will disagree entirely. There is no objective measure. So then, what is the point of art?
It’s different for everyone, and it just so happens that a significant portion find AI generated compositions hollow on top of being unethical.
I wrote a small bulk file management tool that I needed for my work. I wrote it in an easy language (javascript+nodejs). It got the job done and took maybe an hour. But I noticed its flaws and imperfections. So i made a new tool in a very hard to learn language (rust) its taken me months and is already moderately better. In ~2 weeks I will have a tool that I am satisfied with enough to post on the internet for anyone to use.
I could’ve posted my original (crude hammer of a) tool online months ago because, on a basic level they do the same thing regardless of how pleasant it feels to use. Have it posted online to be thrown into a pit full of other tools that do similarly wacky things that are interesting for all of 10 minutes. Tools that slowly break over time. Tools that are silently forgotten.
Great insightful comment, thanks!
Maybe an unpopular opinion, but I like AI art. It can be fun and interesting, I play around with a couple engines myself. I occasionally use the imagery to kick-start my imagination or as inspiration for things I might be working on or thinking about. It’s useful to give your brain a “starting point.”
What I don’t like is people trying to pass off AI computer generated images as some form of accomplishment for themselves (excluding working out a good prompt or modifiers, that can be a bit of work) or trying to pass off the imagery as real in any way. Real IRL or like “I painted this.”
As far as the corporate models scraping content…yeah, they are definitely playing the usual game that it’s ok for them to fuck over the little guy but heaven help you if you’re a day late with a payment to them or torrent a movie.
Art is a key branch of human endeavour that can be described as “the study of choice”. That’s what so many people misunderstand in modern art, is that it’s often more focused on the choices themselves rather than trying to be a skillful representation or depiction of some kind. “That’s just a ___, my kid could do that.”
What is missing from every conversation about AI art is what contribution to “the study of choice” can be made here. There are a thousand variables in the choices made along the way, from which AI and training data was used, to the myriad of prompts used. I am certain that if you were thoughtfully making these choices along the way with a clear idea in mind, you’d be able to make incredibly impactful art that actually enriches us in the usual sense that good art can.
My complaint about AI here, if we will set the enormous scale of theft to one side, is simply that it is being used to create art that doesn’t mean anything, which is inimical to the pursuit of art itself.
My complaint about AI here, if we will set the enormous scale of theft to one side, is simply that it is being used to create art that doesn’t mean anything, which is inimical to the pursuit of art itself.
Thank you.
The meaninglessness and soulelessness is a big part of the problem with AI art.
It has no more “point of view” than a random number generator.
So it won’t be popular. But then there is AI art that’s popular isn’t there? Did a landscape have a point of view when someone took a picture of it? No. But the photographer and everyone that saw something in it afterwards did. The viewer can give the piece meaning. It’s well known that art is subjective. That means you, the subject, determine if what you’re seeing is evoking emotion.
For what it’s worth, I don’t think the brain is magic. So someday something synthetic will have a complex opinion and express it metaphorically. Maybe we’re already there, just not on a human level. Could a rat make art? Because at some point soon computers are going to be on the spectrum of intelligence of a living thing, if it’s not already.
I really like that description! The study of choice. I think that under that lens I’ll be able to appreciate art in a new way. Thanks.
Someone really smart said it to me a few months ago and it changed my world
Fair enough. AI art is often just a highly skilled visual meme generator used in a reactionary manner to whatever is happening at the time, whether it be denim-infused fediverse posts or mocking political figures.
Other than a few drop-down menus that aren’t any better than an iPhone photo filter app, yeah, all the choices have essentially been already made and recombined by the art generation software.
A lot of the more technical art generators seem to have a lot fewer fixed parameters. The failure to put in the effort to learn about them and make those choices is what I’d argue makes most AI art inherently worthless.
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Depends on the workflow, in my opinion. There are people who just type “1girl lol” into a text box and there are some people who set up workflows with hundreds of steps including significant manual work done in Photoshop or GIMP.
Similarly nearly all music these days is made with a DAW, which enables you to selectively edit and combine performances that otherwise you wouldn’t be able to achieve. Drummer off beat? Quantize it. Want a string section but don’t know how to play violin? Use a synth. And certainly there are people who are overly reliant on those tools because their core music abilities aren’t very strong.
If you think any amount of computer assistance means that something isn’t art, then basically all music made since the 90s would also not be art. It’s not a binary. Any tool can be used tastefully or be used to mask an underlying lack of talent.
You don’t usually call the audio engineer a musician though. The fact that you “want a string section” is the important part. Art is communication, if you fuck with the AI until it communicates what you want, that can be art, as long as you’re not trying to pass off that the fake brushstrokes contain any meaning. If you learn all the right prompt words to make it “good” and then Photoshop it to fix all the telltale AI glitches but the only idea being communicated comes from 6 random people on Deviantart smashed together, that’s not art.
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I’d welcome you to offer a rigorous definition of this supposedly well-known distinction. Computers don’t generate anything spontaneously. They always require some level of direction.
Are the outputs of VSTs not “computer generated”? You can fumble around on a keyboard just moving up and down until you find the pitch you want, and the software will output an orchestral swell of dozens of instruments that take years and years to master, with none of that effort expended by the one mashing the keyboard.
Is that sound computer-assisted or computer-generated in your estimation? Much the same with AI images. It’s not fundamentally different from any other computerized tool.
That’s pretty reductive and bad comparison. Your example boils down to saying that you could argue guitarist is a machine assisted.
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I said in my original post that just typing a prompt isn’t an example of skill. I stated that there are people who use both AI and non-AI tools in complex workflows that include a ton of manual work, and in those cases it’s disingenuous to write off the process as not being creative.
I’m not sure exactly what you’re arguing against, but it isn’t the position I took. Seems like a reading comprehension issue.
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Would you call a person that creates paintings by cutting images from magazines an artist?
What if the person cuts the images from AI generated content?
The issue with your categorical “no nuance” stance is that there is nuance in the world.
I just call the people in my Discord who generate AI images AI Handlers because to me it’s like getting a half trained unruly animal to do what you want. That being said when they take requests for character art for tabletop games they put out some good stuff. It’s just a tool to be used and it often takes an experienced handler to get what you want out of it.
I’d be perfectly fine being called an AI Handler over an artist, its an apt descriptor and I’m not doing this to trick anybody. One of the top posts on all today is about true luxuries, and one of them is the Luxury of being able to fully express ones self, to which this new tool has provided to me faaar more than any tool previous. If I’m sharing my creations its because I’m excited to have a visual representation and I want to share it with those interested, I’m not trying to downplay the skillset of other artists, nor do I care about cred. I’m just excited to finally have an outlet for my creativity that doesnt require me to devote years of my life to learning specific skills before I’m able to start doing what I actually want to do, which is to be creative
I don’t really think you’re expressing much of yourself with an AI, especially creativity. I mean all the power to you if you think so, but you can’t really claim to be anything more than a slightly less cumbersome Google image search bot.
Basically you give “search terms” and then use your judgement to pick and choose. There’s very little expression and a whole lot curating of someone else’s work. I guess if you think making music playlist is an expression of creativity, sure it’ll qualify. But that’s some shallow expression of a personality when it comes to art. Might want to phrase that differently.
Lmao, I could’t give less of a shit what you think about my own feelings of creative expression. Have a nice day!
How does this argument not also apply to photography? A modern camera is a computer, you fiddle with the settings, press a button and it automatically makes a picture for you. People produce billions of shitty photographs a day which aren’t art, but that doesn’t mean someone working in photography as a medium can’t be an artist.
In my experience it’s only non-artists who make this argument, because in their heads they’re comparing AI to painting. But for visual artists there are tons of mediums and disciplines where you don’t physically make the marks yourself and it’s the concept and composition that’s important.
There was an exhibition of AI generated art at the big local gallery here last year and I expected artist friends to be against it, but they were just like “oh, that’s interesting”. They just see AI generation as another way of creating an image and whether a particular image is or isn’t art depends on the intention not the process.
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Taking medium into account changes everything. A sculpture artist or painter doesn’t have the same interest or concern about AI art yet, and may never. They also tend to not have the same comprehensive view of AI generation as well as training data.
That being said, digital photography doesn’t remotely compare. If I were to set my DSLR up with a lens, set an F stop and shutter speed, the results would be similar to that of a film camera. A sensor takes in light in the same way film does. A 30 second exposure at a 500 ISO will compare to a 30 second camera on a certain film type, which is comparable to ISO settings.
Artificially bumping up light sensitivity on a DSLR degrades image quality. Analog and digital are largely comparable. So how would it apply to photography? It’s not just automatically making a picture, and if it were doing that on auto, it’s still not all that different from a film photo with generic catch all sensors and light metering.
Photography is all about catching the moment, personally I captured night landscapes via manual long exposure on a DSLR, but none of that is automatic.
If you use commands to tell an AI to make a piece of art, you’re somewhere between a programmer and a manager I think.
Ok so edm and electronic music isn’t music…ok buddy. Nice definition.
AI that generates music and humans producing electronic music / EDM have nothing in common.
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AI art is like the speech synthesiser that came with Amiga’s Workbench. Amusing for yourself to make it say swears, but of no interest to anyone else.
Ventrilo tts
My helicopter goes soisoisoisoisoisoisoi
Until it becomes part of the samples/loops for a whole new genre of music two decades later. Like the TR909 drum machine and the popular “amen break” rhythm line.
Yeah no one will ever have any use for synthesized voice. It’s like the drum machine, just a silly gadget which will never have any impact on music…
Hmmm.
Ai image gen will continue to improve, a kid born today will likely grow in a world where they’re completely used to game render engines using generative ai, where they design complex and beautiful virtual worlds, and where art lessons focus more on design and expression than technical skill (which people interested in will learn with thy help of ai tools).
You’re welcome to feel however you like about new technologies but don’t tattoo your idea that ai image gen is just a fad because it won’t age well.
I think there are interesting aspects of AI art. It takes a real artist to properly instruct an AI to create something new, different, and interesting. When I think of modern art, a lot of art snobs were dismissive of it because “it’s not art.” I think we will see the same opinions of AI art change as new, different, and interesting artwork is made.
Thing is, generated art is not new or different. It’s a machine amalgamation of existing works. The only vaguely interesting bits are how it mangles body parts into some kind of Cronenberg horror.
Humans certainly don’t make new things out of nothing. They also take from different sources and combine them together to make something new, whether that’s direct inspiration or on a more abstract level through the brain.
Learning models aren’t generating art any more than GIMP or Photoshop is. It’s the person behind the tool that makes the art, not the tool. There’s certainly an art to prompt smithing.
I feel like a lot of people dismiss generated art simply because it’s new (and because as a byproduct is spits out dozens of junk pieces before getting anywhere good). I don’t see how it’s that different from someone using photo-editing software built with dozens of algorithms instead of a ‘pure’ drawing pad, or someone using a drawing pad instead of a pencil, or someone using a pencil instead of chalk. It’s a tool, and a great one at that in comparison to many digital tools for artists.
People dismiss AI art because they (correctly) see that it requires zero skill to make compared to actual art, and it has all the novelty of a block of Velveeta.
If AI is no more a tool than Photoshop, go and make something in GIMP, or photoshop, or any of the dozens of drawing/art programs, from scratch. I’ll wait.
Then those same people will also dismiss bananas taped to the wall for requiring “zero skill” and thus out themselves as having no idea what art actually is.
The true artist was the guy who ate the banana.
Different kind of art.
Art is art, no matter the medium or author. City bureaucrats building a parking lot, and only a parking lot and not commissioning an admonishing memorial or something, can be art if it’s at the place of Hitler’s bunker.
People dismiss AI art because they (correctly) see that it requires zero skill to make compared to actual art, and it has all the novelty of a block of Velveeta.
I look at art because I find it pretty, not because someone toiled over it for hours on end. Sure, I respect the artist who made it and think their effort commendable, certainly worth a sum of money, but if something is made such that the art of the craft requires less skill and time surely that is a good thing?
Novelty of the tool doesn’t matter. What’s new changes daily, and the point of a tool is not to be new but to be useful.
If you mean the art itself that is generated being samey or problematic in that sense of non-uniqueness, I disagree wholeheartedly. You can do a lot with learning models, and the sameness people perceive is from inexperienced novices dipping their hands in and flooding the ecosystem with beginner works, in much the same way DeviantArt was once flooded with drawings on the level of stick figures and box people.If AI is no more a tool than Photoshop, go and make something in GIMP, or photoshop, or any of the dozens of drawing/art programs, from scratch. I’ll wait.
A hammer is a tool, and so is an electric jackhammer. You don’t tell a construction worker to go use a hammer when an electric jackhammer gets the job done far better and far more efficiently, and not everyone is suited to using a hammer just as not everyone is suited to using an electric jackhammer. They also have different purposes, but certainly the electric jackhammer did replace some of the uses the hammer once had, but it doesn’t make the hammer obsolete. I view learning models that generate art in the same manner as an electric jackhammer. Useful and powerful, but ultimately lacking in refinement and the work will certainly need other tools to finish the job.
This phrase of yours just doesn’t mean much. I don’t see how making something in GIMP proves anything for anyone?
I don’t see how it’s that different from someone using photo-editing software built with dozens of algorithms instead of a ‘pure’ drawing pad, or someone using a drawing pad instead of a pencil, or someone using a pencil instead of chalk. It’s a tool, and a great one at that in comparison to many digital tools for artists.
It is different because a person isn’t involved, it’s a machine outputting the information without intent whatsoever (as machines do)
That’s not true though— extensive effort is put into prompting, parameter tweaking, etc.
Compared to how much effort it takes to learn how to draw yourself? The effort is trivial. It’s like entering a Toyota Camry into a marathon and then bragging about how good you did and how hard it was to drive the course.
It’s commendable to be good at something that requires a lot of effort. Making a hut with your bare hands is a lot more impressive than making a hut with all the construction tools of the modern day at your disposal. However, so what? I’d still rather have a house made with modern tools because it’s cheaper and more efficient for everybody involved.
I think there already is AI art but it’s not the art that everyone is talking about, it’s not your run-of-the-mill fantasy illustration prompt but people exploring what can be made with tools like that.
Rather than focusing on emulating traditional illustration, they invent their own processes and that is the work.
AI art is, by very definition, average.
It’s the best fit line. It’s the most common. The mean or the median.
The best art is exceptional.
Wow this really succinctly describes what I feel whenever I see AI art. It’s just an overwhelming feeling of indifference.
Average AI art is average. Exceptional AI art is exceptional.
People who use AI as the tool it is, rather than just feeding it a single prompt and taking a few good results, can make art just like any other artist using a tool. Some of that art is exceptional. Most of it is average. Just like any other tool.
The best AI art is often the result of multiple passes with inpainting and refining, and touchups in other tools. But that takes time, effort, and skill. Just like any other tool.
LMFAO “uhm ackshually guys AI art takes skill just like human art”
yeah bud, spending 30 minutes typing sentences into the artist crushing machine is grueling work
That’s not how most people using it creatively are doing it though, have you seen the actual workflows people use? Inpainting and stuff, it can be just as involved as collage or other artforms.
For real, most of the people in this thread have no idea how any of these tools work.
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Wow, it’s like I’m back on reddit.
Any example of exceptional AI art?
Art is subjective. What I find impactful or meaningful may not be what you find impactful or meaningful. I’ll just say I’ve seen exceptional AI art, but it’s rare.
I can’t remember the specifics, but I do recall there was a work that won some art contest and then had its win revoked because AI generation was used in its creation. I recall really liking that piece.
Edit: I find it remarkable that anyone would downvote what I said in this post. The other I get, you all have your notions and aren’t going to change your minds, that’s fine, I get it. But nothing I said in this post was controversial.
I fully agree with you. However, there’s no point bringing it up here in this echo chamber of luddites. They’re deathly afraid of ai (for no real reason), and it really shows.
I’m not afraid of AI and I’m certainly not a luddite my friend. I used to lecture about technology in art on several university courses.
I’ve used algorithms to generate work that has been shown on an international stage, and used computers to run massive participatory art shows.
I currently work in publishing, and I can’t express how much AI has already impacted the landscape through generative text. It doesn’t compete with traditional authors, it just smothers them through sheer volume. It clogs up submission processes and it fills open calls… And nearly every one using generative methods thinks they should be called an “author” just because they put a few words into a prompt.
There really is a reason I hold this point if view and it is based on experience and education as well as being part of an industry that this is already having an impact on.
If you want me to take you seriously, I’m going to need some real discussion around the firm that goes beyond name calling and vague statements.
I honestly don’t give a fuck whether you take me seriously or not. As a luddite and technophobe, your opinion means less than nothing to me.
Doesn’t change the fact that you’re afraid of AI though. It is gonna change things, and just because you’re afraid of it isn’t going to stop it. I suggest you learn to adapt.
Bet you are into NFTs too, huh?
Not really. Were you?
Nah this is just an epidemic of lazy people who want the credit of being called an artist without putting in any of the work.
Nah its an epidemic of cowards who are afraid of things they don’t understand. Here’s some advice. Educate yourself, and maybe try to understand things before making stupid statements.
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lol imagine being scared of autocomplete. What a time to be alive.
“I feel like a lot of the anti-AI people just… want there to be less beautiful art in the world”
I certainly don’t want to speak for all “anti-AI people”, but personally …yeah.
Even before the generative AI boom, you could find an essentially limitless stream of artworks on the internet. If you exposed yourself to that for long enough, you’d eventually go numb to things just being beautiful for the sake of being beautiful.
Occasionally, you’d stumble over expressive art, which had a meaning beyond that, which conveyed an emotion, which was a labor of love and/or hatred.
Even before the generative AI boom, this expressive art was buried under heaps of profitable artworks, because artists were taking the second-best option for pursuing their passion.So, while I would’ve preferred less profitable artworks and more expressive art, I was always perfectly fine with it, because I knew it was humans doing the necessary.
Now with generative AI, it’s just yet another magnitude more artworks thrown on top, with even less meaning.
Where a missing finger might have been a powerful expression of the artist’s struggles, now it’s just an every-day-defect of the AI.It just buries the expressive art even further, obstructs any meaningfulness and makes me even number to beauty. I absolutely do not care for a greater quantity of art. I want greater quality, and not in terms of beauty.
AI image tools are useful for one thing and one thing only.
Putting Godzilla in the most ridiculous situations possible.
https://forums.mst3k.com/t/dall-e-fun-with-an-ai/24697/7734
Start at the bottom. It doesn’t start with Godzilla, but eventually we discovered the true meaning of AI image creation. Also because it’s getting close to 8000 posts at this point.
We really like putting Godzilla in ridiculous situations.
I like the idea that AI art is for art that wasn’t worth having a human create. Does it make sense for a human to create pictures of Godzilla in ridiculous situations? If you’re feeling really inspired, then go for it, but nobody should otherwise feel obliged to spend an afternoon on it.
A little while ago, I created a LLM Vogon poetry generator for a Hitchikers themed party. Is it worth having a human create intentionally bad poetry for a party? I would again say no. Even there, though, a lot of people didn’t like it. Partially because they were afraid of just how bad Vogon poetry could be, but there was some clear dislike of anything associated to AI, even for this silly use case.
Not terrible, usable as rough concept art but not nearly good enough to be reference. While the general likeness has consistency there’s inconsistencies in the eybrows and ears and don’t get me started on the costumes they’re all plain different.
The main issue I have here, knowing that it’s AI, is whether he’s holding his blade by the, well, blade because he’s just that kind of vampire or because the AI messed up and the human didn’t notice.
What your link points me to. Do i need an account to see them?
Something is interfering with your DNS or traffic, loads fine for me.
I have no idea but yes I didn’t delete my account. Here’s a link to the thread on old.reddit.com, it’s the link in the top comment.
Same issue. Does this work?
Nvm. Looks like you have to access it from the thread and not here?
If you read this thread closely, the problem isn’t AI, it’s capitalism and its extractive design.
Honestly, just pass a law saying you’re not allowed to use a model that was trained using non public domain material.
Voila, AI can be permitted without robbing existing artists and artists still have a monopoly on new material.
Um, good luck trying to get that law passed.
This just in: thieves realize law means that they aren’t supposed to steal, theft rate collapse to 0%.
Also those signs at school campuses saying they are a “no gun zone” means school shootings are officially a thing of the past. Phew, why didn’t we think of this earlier?
This just in, local dumbass forgets that the point of it being a law is to throw assholes who do it anyways in jail for being the assholes they are!
Aw, you don’t have to refer to yourself in the third person like that
Almost a full day to think about it and the best you could come up with is “no u”
Imagine thinking that I sat around all day to think about this conundrum. L m f a o. Some of us have lives beyond the internet, sweetheart <3
Does anyone want anyone’s art? Has any artist other than the rare 0.01% ever been sought out or recognized? How is this any different?
I think pretty much every artist is recognized to an extent.
People talk about A.I. art threatening artist jobs but everything I’ve seen created by A.I. tools is the most absolute dogshit art ever made, counting the stuff they found in Saddam Hussein’s mansions.
So, I would think the theft of IP for training models is the larger objection. No one thinks a Balder’s Gate 3 fan was gonna commission an artist to make a drawing for them. They’re pissed their work was used without permission.
It’s not replacing artists who make beautiful art, it’s going to replace artists who work for a living. Doesn’t matter if the quality is bad when it’s costs nothing.
The problem is artists often make their actual living doing basic boiler plate stuff that gets forgotten quickly.
In graphics it’s Company logos, advertising, basic graphics for businesses.
In writing it’s copy for websites, it’s short articles, it’s basic stuff.
Very few artists want to do these things, they want to create the original work that might not make money at all. That work potentially being a winning lottery ticket but most often being an act of expressing themselves that doesn’t turn into a payday.
Unfortunately AI is taking work away from artists. It can’t seem to make very good art yet but it can prevent artists who could make good art getting to the point of making it.
It’s starving out the top end of the creative market by limiting the easy work artists could previously rely on to pay the bills whilst working on the big ideas.
The problem is that most artists make money from commercial clients and most clients don’t want “good”.
The want “good enough” and “cheap”.
And that’s why it is taking artists jobs.
You should check out this article by Kit Walsh, a senior staff attorney at the EFF, and this one by Katherine Klosek, the director of information policy and federal relations at the Association of Research Libraries.
Using things “without permission” forms the bedrock on which artistic expression and free speech as a whole are built upon. I am glad to see that the law aligns with these principles and protects our ability to engage openly and without fear of reprisal, which is crucial for fostering a healthy society.
I find myself at odds with the polarized argumentation about AI. If you don’t like it, that’s understandable, but don’t make it so that if someone uses AI, they have to defend themselves from accusations of exploiting labor and the environment. Those accusations are often times incorrect or made without substantial evidence.
I’m open to that conversation, as long as we can keep it respectful and productive. Drop a reply if you want, it’s way better than unexplained downvoting.
Yes, using existing works as reference is obviously something that real human artists do all the time, there’s no arguing that is the case. That’s how people learn to create art to begin with.
But, the fact is, generative AI is not creative, nor does it understand what creativity is, nor will it ever. Because all it is doing is performing complex data statistical analysis algorithms to generate a matrix of pixels or a string of words.
Im sorry, but the person entering in the prompt to instruct the algorithm is also not doing anything creative either. Do you think it is art to go through a fast food drive through and place an order? That’s what people are objecting to - people calling themselves artists because they put some nonsense word salad together and then think what they get out of it is some unique thing that they feel they created and take ownership of. If not for the AI model they are using and the creative works it was trained on, they could not have created it or likely even imagined it without it.
People are actively losing their livelihoods because AI tech is being oversold and overhyped as something that it’s not. Execs are all jumping on the bandwagon and because they see AI as something that will save them a bunch of money, they are laying off people they think aren’t needed anymore. So, just try to incorporate that sentiment into your understanding of why people are also upset about AI. You may not be personally affected, but there are countless that are. In fact, over the next two years, as many as 203,000 entertainment workers in the US alone could be affected
You want to have fun creating fancy kitbashed images based off of other people’s work, go right ahead. Just don’t call it art and call yourself an artist, unless you could actually make it yourself using practical skills.
Also, good luck trying to copyright it because guess what, you can’t.
Yes, using existing works as reference is obviously something that real human artists do all the time, there’s no arguing that is the case. That’s how people learn to create art to begin with.
But, the fact is, generative AI is not creative, nor does it understand what creativity is, nor will it ever. Because all it is doing is performing complex data statistical analysis algorithms to generate a matrix of pixels or a string of words.
Im sorry, but the person entering in the prompt to instruct the algorithm is also not doing anything creative either. Do you think it is art to go through a fast food drive through and place an order? That’s what people are objecting to - people calling themselves artists because they put some nonsense word salad together and then think what they get out of it is some unique thing that they feel they created and take ownership of. If not for the AI model they are using and the creative works it was trained on, they could not have created it or likely even imagined it without it.
I’d like to ask you what experience you have with generative art, because I’d like to explain a bit of what I know,
There’s also a spectrum of involvement depending on what tool you’re using. I know with web based interfaces don’t allow for a lot of freedom due to wanting to keep users from generating things outside their terms of use, but with open source models based on Stable Diffusion you can get a lot more involved and get a lot more freedom. We’re in a completely different world from March 2023 as far as generative tools go. Take a quick look at things work.
Let’s take these generation parameters for instance:
sarasf, 1girl, solo, robe, long sleeves, white footwear, smile, wide sleeves, closed mouth, blush, looking at viewer, sitting, tree stump, forest, tree, sky, traditional media, 1990s \(style\), <lora:sarasf_V2-10:0.7>Negative prompt: (worst quality, low quality:1.4), FastNegativeV2Steps: 21, VAE: kl-f8-anime2.ckpt, Size: 512x768, Seed: 2303584416, Model: Based64mix-V3-Pruned, Version: v1.6.0, Sampler: DPM++ 2M Karras, VAE hash: df3c506e51, CFG scale: 6, Clip skip: 2, Model hash: 98a1428d4c, Hires steps: 16, "sarasf_V2-10: 1ca692d73fb1", Hires upscale: 2, Hires upscaler: 4x_foolhardy_Remacri, "FastNegativeV2: a7465e7cc2a2",ADetailer model: face_yolov8n.pt, ADetailer version: 23.11.1, Denoising strength: 0.38, ADetailer mask blur: 4, ADetailer model 2nd: Eyes.pt, ADetailer confidence: 0.3, ADetailer dilate erode: 4, ADetailer mask blur 2nd: 4, ADetailer confidence 2nd: 0.3, ADetailer inpaint padding: 32, ADetailer dilate erode 2nd: 4, ADetailer denoising strength: 0.42, ADetailer inpaint only masked: True, ADetailer inpaint padding 2nd: 32, ADetailer denoising strength 2nd: 0.43, ADetailer inpaint only masked 2nd: TrueTo break down a bit of what’s going on here, I’d like to explain some of the elements found here.
sarasfis the token for the LoRA of the character in this image, and<lora:sarasf_V2-10:0.7>is the character LoRA for Sarah from Shining Force II. LoRA are like supplementary models you use on top of a base model to capture a style or concept, like a patch. Some LoRA don’t have activation tokens, and some with them can be used without their token to get different results.The 0.7 in
<lora:sarasf_V2-10:0.7>refers to the strength at which the weights from the LoRA are applied to the output. Lowering the number causes the concept to manifest weaker in the output. You can blend styles this way with just the base model or multiple LoRA at the same time at different strengths. Furthurmore you can adjust the UNet and Text Encoder by adding another colon like so :<lora:sarasf_V2-10:1:0.7>for even more varied results. Doing this allows you to separate the “idea” from the “look” of the LoRA. You can even use a monochrome LoRA and take the weight into the negative to get some crazy colors.The Negative Prompt is where you include things you don’t want in your image.
(worst quality, low quality:1.4),here are quality tags and have their attention set to 1.4. Attention is sort of like weight, but for tokens. LoRA bring their own weights to add onto the model, whereas attention on tokens works completely inside the weights they’re given. In this negative promptFastNegativeV2is an embedding known as a Textual Inversion. It’s sort of like a crystallized collection of tokens that tell the model something precise you want without having to enter the tokens yourself or mess around with the attention manually. Embeddings you put in the negative prompt are known as Negative Embeddings.In the next part,
Stepsstands for how many steps you want the model to take to solve the starting noise into an image. More steps take longer.VAEis the name of the Variational Autoencoder used in this generation. The VAE is responsible for working with the weights to make each image unique. A mismatch of VAE and model can yield blurry and desaturated images, so some models opt to have their VAE baked in,Sizeare the dimensions in pixels the image will be generated at.Seedis the number representation of the starting noise for the image. You need this to be able to reproduce a specific image.Modelis the name of the model used, andSampleris the name of the algorithm that solves the noise into an image. There are a few different samplers, also known as schedulers, each with their own trade-offs for speed, quality, and memory usage.CFGis basically how close you want the model to follow your prompt. Some models can’t handle high CFG values and flip out, giving over-exposed or nonsense output.Hires stepsrepresents the amount of steps you want to take on the second pass to upscale the output. This is necessary to get higher resolution images without visual artifacts.Hires upscaleris the name of the model that was used during the upscaling step, and again there are a ton of those with their own trade-offs and use cases.After
ADetailerare the parameters for Adetailer, an extension that does a post-process pass to fix things like broken anatomy, faces, and hands. We’ll just leave it at that because I don’t feel like explaining all the different settings found there.
https://youtu.be/-JQDtzSaAuA?t=97
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HtbEuERXSqk
Not all selfies are art, but you can make art with cameras. I think the same applies here.
People are actively losing their livelihoods because AI tech is being oversold and overhyped as something that it’s not. Execs are all jumping on the bandwagon and because they see AI as something that will save them a bunch of money, they are laying off people they think aren’t needed anymore. So, just try to incorporate that sentiment into your understanding of why people are also upset about AI. You may not be personally affected, but there are countless that are. In fact, over the next two years, as many as 203,000 entertainment workers in the US alone could be affected
This EFF article by Katharine Trendacosta and Cory Doctorow touches on this. I think it’s worth a read.
You want to have fun creating fancy kitbashed images based off of other people’s work, go right ahead.
This is misinformation, and not how the technology works. Here’s a quick video explanation,
Just don’t call it art and call yourself an artist, unless you could actually make it yourself using practical skills.
This is just snobbery that people have always used to devalue the efforts of others. Punching down and gatekeeping won’t solve your problems, the people you’re really mad at are above you.
Art is about bringing your ideas into the world, anything beyond that is fetish. Spending hundreds of hours learning a skill isn’t art, it’s work. While I believe the effort invested in a work can contribute to its depth and meaning, that doesn’t make them better than works without as much effort.
cont.
I appreciate that you taken time to explain the technical aspects into what generative AI is processing under the hood, but the reality is that no amount of programming will ever be able to recreate the uniqueness and infinite variability of human creativity, emotion, imagination or consciousness. There is an immeasurable difference between true creativity and producing variations on a data set. I say this as both an artist and a programmer. I’m not just talking out of my ass.
I agree with you that a goal of art is to express ideas and that there’s are a lot of people in the art world that fetishize art in to being something more important than it is in certain contexts, but art is also a core component and something unique to humanity(and sometimes even to other species.) In that way, it’s something to be cherish and regarded - and throughout history it has been extremely culturally significant. Trying to translate these concepts into an algorithm, in my mind, nothing but an extremely arrogant waste of effort and time. Why not spend your time automating the boring shit no one wants to do rather than the creative things people actually enjoy doing?
I am not gatekeeping. I am just stating simple facts. I find it offensive and demeaning that you are devaluing the immense amount of effort that artists undergo to hone their crafts and produce art. You’re damn right it’s work - if you want to get proficient at something, that’s what it takes. I don’t care how boomer-ey that sounds. Yes, some artists have natural talent and don’t need as much effort as others. But, nonetheless, effort is required to create. Anyone can create art, not just some elite select few. But, not everyone can create art that is universally recognized as great or masterful, and it’s not a problem that need to be solved by technology. Unfortunately, art is subjective, so not everything one creates is perceived the same. That’s why some are more successful than others. You may argue that AI levels the playing field, but the fact is that it leverages the work of “successful” artists or artworks, and generates results that are perceived as successful or appealing as a result. It’s a shortcut. You are bypassing the effort otherwise needed by using a tool, which allows most users to to be totally ignorant of the basic knowledge required to create an art work - shape language, color theory, composition, lighting, appeal, posing, etc.
Entering a prompt into an AI model is akin to directing, producing or acting as a muse. It’s a very similar argument as to the validity or artistic merits of factory artists like Andy Warhol or Jeff Koons - While you are responsible for the idea that produces a result, you are still relying on the work and effort of not only the numerous team of people creating the AI model and its algorithms , but also the immeasurable amount of man-hours and creativity involved in creating the source content for the model training materials.
It’s one thing to use generative AI as tool, with intent to make use of the output as reference for your own work in a larger context. But to take the direct output and call it art is morally and ethically wrong. In my eyes, it makes you look like a total hack who doesn’t want to put the effort in to make things for themselves…no matter how much time you put into coming up with the prompt for the output.
I still stand by my original arguments - coming up with a prompt or a training data set to create an image is not art, because you are not actively involved with the creation of the imagery, itself. What an AI model generates is not a creative work and it is not your creation. If that is offensive to you, there’s nothing I can do about that, because it’s apparent that your arguments only serve to make yourself feel better about using generative AI.
It’s also apparent that you have an extremely skewed view of what art is and what it means to be an artist. Art, at its base level is about expressing HUMAN creativity, not what an algorithm interprets it to be. It’s about making countless, specific choices for each step of the creative process and having complete control of the final outcome. It’s those choices that make your art truly unique and an expression of your creative vision. It doesn’t matter if it is objectively bad or good, just that it came from you, and that every detail, every color, every line, was your choice, not an interpretation of your words.
Unless you are creating your own AI model from scratch and training it purely on your own artworks, I don’t see how you can, in good conscience, claim the results to be your own.
Any one can create art, but an artist is someone who dedicates themselves to their craft, as with any other craftsman. That passion is what separates an artisan from a hobbyist. You may view this as snobbery, but I view it as respect and honoring a tradition that spans all of human kind, back to the earliest cave paintings tens of thousands of years ago. I know my limits and what I’m capable of and I have come to terms with those deficiencies in my work. I’m not delusional enough to think that by generating an image through AI, it somehow makes up for those shortcomings and makes me into something I am not.
I appreciate that you taken time to explain the technical aspects into what generative AI is processing under the hood, but the reality is that no amount of programming will ever be able to recreate the uniqueness and infinite variability of human creativity, emotion, imagination or consciousness. There is an immeasurable difference between true creativity and producing variations on a data set. I say this as both an artist and a programmer. I’m not just talking out of my ass.
The goal here isn’t to replace human uniqueness, creativity, emotion, imagination, or consciousness, but to give people a robust tool to help them explore concepts and express themselves.
I agree with you that a goal of art is to express ideas and that there’s are a lot of people in the art world that fetishize art in to being something more important than it is in certain contexts, but art is also a core component and something unique to humanity(and sometimes even to other species.) In that way, it’s something to be cherish and regarded - and throughout history it has been extremely culturally significant. Trying to translate these concepts into an algorithm, in my mind, nothing but an extremely arrogant waste of effort and time. Why not spend your time automating the boring shit no one wants to do rather than the creative things people actually enjoy doing?
If it allows people to more effectively communicate, express themselves, learn, and come together, it’s worth the trouble. The more people can participate in these conversations, the more we can all learn.
I am not gatekeeping. I am just stating simple facts. I find it offensive and demeaning that you are devaluing the immense amount of effort that artists undergo to hone their crafts and produce art. You’re damn right it’s work - if you want to get proficient at something, that’s what it takes. I don’t care how boomer-ey that sounds. Yes, some artists have natural talent and don’t need as much effort as others. But, nonetheless, effort is required to create. Anyone can create art, not just some elite select few. But, not everyone can create art that is universally recognized as great or masterful, and it’s not a problem that need to be solved by technology. Unfortunately, art is subjective, so not everything one creates is perceived the same. That’s why some are more successful than others. You may argue that AI levels the playing field, but the fact is that it leverages the work of “successful” artists or artworks, and generates results that are perceived as successful or appealing as a result. It’s a shortcut. You are bypassing the effort otherwise needed by using a tool, which allows most users to to be totally ignorant of the basic knowledge required to create an art work - shape language, color theory, composition, lighting, appeal, posing, etc.
You are putting words in my mouth. I never devalued anyone’s work, unless you read that when I said I don’t think pieces that take more work or skill aren’t inherently worth more than those that were easier to produce. Is it even possible for there to be shortcuts in art? It’s harder to erase a line and fix it on canvas than it is to draw an incorrect one and just resize it. Let’s not even talk about things like shrinking a whole head to make it fit. Where in the gradient from canvas to AI does creating become cheating?
That reminds me of a quote from over a hundred years ago:
As the photographic industry was the refuge of every would-be painter, every painter too ill-endowed or too lazy to complete his studies, this universal infatuation bore not only the mark of a blindness, an imbecility, but had also the air of a vengeance. I do not believe, or at least I do not wish to believe, in the absolute success of such a brutish conspiracy, in which, as in all others, one finds both fools and knaves; but I am convinced that the ill-applied developments of photography, like all other purely material developments of progress, have contributed much to the impoverishment of the French artistic genius, which is already so scarce. It is nonetheless obvious that this industry, by invading the territories of art, has become art’s most mortal enemy, and that the confusion of their several functions prevents any of them from being properly fulfilled.
― Charles Baudelaire, On Photography, from The Salon of 1859
It sounds a lot like what you’re trying to say.
Entering a prompt into an AI model is akin to directing, producing or acting as a muse. It’s a very similar argument as to the validity or artistic merits of factory artists like Andy Warhol or Jeff Koons - While you are responsible for the idea that produces a result, you are still relying on the work and effort of not only the numerous team of people creating the AI model and its algorithms , but also the immeasurable amount of man-hours and creativity involved in creating the source content for the model training materials.
This can be said of many tools, from graphics rendering engines and art software to mass-produced pigments and tools. It took us 100,000 years to get from cave drawings to Leonard Da Vinci. This is just another step for artists, like Camera Obscura was in the past. It’s important to remember that early man was as smart as we are, they just lacked the interconnectivity and tools that we get.
It’s one thing to use generative AI as tool, with intent to make use of the output as reference for your own work in a larger context. But to take the direct output and call it art is morally and ethically wrong. In my eyes, it makes you look like a total hack who doesn’t want to put the effort in to make things for themselves…no matter how much time you put into coming up with the prompt for the output.
I still stand by my original arguments - coming up with a prompt or a training data set to create an image is not art, because you are not actively involved with the creation of the imagery, itself. What an AI model generates is not a creative work and it is not your creation. If that is offensive to you, there’s nothing I can do about that, because it’s apparent that your arguments only serve to make yourself feel better about using generative AI.
This is just personal option. And I never felt bad about using it in the first place. It feels like you’re projecting your own feelings onto me.
It’s also apparent that you have an extremely skewed view of what art is and what it means to be an artist. Art, at its base level is about expressing HUMAN creativity, not what an algorithm interprets it to be. It’s about making countless, specific choices for each step of the creative process and having complete control of the final outcome. It’s those choices that make your art truly unique and an expression of your creative vision. It doesn’t matter if it is objectively bad or good, just that it came from you, and that every detail, every color, every line, was your choice, not an interpretation of your words.
It is still a human making generative art, and they use their emotions and learned experiences to guide the creation of works. You should familiarize yourself with all the different forms of guidance available with generative art. I think you’ll be pleasantly surprised.
Any one can create art, but an artist is someone who dedicates themselves to their craft, as with any other craftsman. That passion is what separates an artisan from a hobbyist. You may view this as snobbery, but I view it as respect and honoring a tradition that spans all of human kind, back to the earliest cave paintings tens of thousands of years ago. I know my limits and what I’m capable of and I have come to terms with those deficiencies in my work. I’m not delusional enough to think that by generating an image through AI, it somehow makes up for those shortcomings and makes me into something I am not.
This is a no-true-scotsman fallacy, you’re attempting to narrowly define artists to serve your needs, when no definition of “true artists” has ever existed. The rest of this is personal perspective that you shouldn’t force onto others. Let them create how they want, and in time, I think we’ll all come to benefit from their labors.
Unless you are creating your own AI model from scratch and training it purely on your own artworks, I don’t see how you can, in good conscience, claim the results to be your own.
Did you create all the textures you put onto your 3d models? Did you use substance painter? Any sort of asset library? If you’re working in 2d, did you create your own brush textures?
Did you create colour and perspective theory from scratch? If not, how can you call yourself a painter?
Did Duchamp study the manufacture of ceramics before putting a factory-made urinal on a pedestal and called it a piece of art?
Wow, nice rhetorical questions you got there, bud.
What the fuck do you think?
If you had enough reading comprehension and read through my whole response, you would have got to the part where I said creating art is about the culmination of choices you make in each part of the process.
Maybe you can point it out to me, but I don’t recall the part where I said you have to recreate the fucking wheel every time you create something.
That particular quote you pointed out, was specific to generative AI, because you don’t make those same choices. The model and the training data is what produces those results for you.
But since you asked, yes I do have the knowledge to create textures by hand without Substance Painter. I’ve been doing 3d art since 2003, before that shit even existed and we hand to do it all manually in Photoshop.
No, I didn’t fucking create color and perspective theory. What do you think I am… like a fucking immortal from ancient times? But I did have to learn that shit and took multiple classes dedicated to each of those topics.
Lastly, you must have skipped on your art history for the last one, because the whole concept of that particular piece was that it was absurdist - an every day object raised to status of art by the artist. He didn’t fucking sculpt the urinal himself. So it would have been more appropriate to say he was a janitor that got lucky. Nice try, though.
That particular quote you pointed out, was specific to generative AI, because you don’t make those same choices. The model and the training data is what produces those results for you.
And for a photographer, their surroundings is what produces many results, leading them to not make choices about those things. They focus on other things, don’t express themselves in the arrangement of leaves on a tree, leave that stuff to chance.
The important part is not that choices are made for you, but that you do make, at the very least, a choice. One single choice suffices to have intent. It is not even necessary to make that choice during the creation of the piece, splattering five buckets of paint onto five canvases and choosing the one that sparks the right impression a choice.
because the whole concept of that particular piece was that it was absurdist - an every day object raised to status of art by the artist.
Yes, precisely. That one concept, the single choice, “yep a urinal should be both provocative and banal enough”, is what made it art.
There is no minimum level of craft necessary for art.
Here is an alternative Piped link(s):
https://piped.video/-JQDtzSaAuA?t=97
https://piped.video/1d_jns4W1cM
https://www.piped.video/watch?v=HtbEuERXSqk
Piped is a privacy-respecting open-source alternative frontend to YouTube.
I’m open-source; check me out at GitHub.
Mate, that’s not art, that’s coding. Congratulations on learning a new coding skill and how inputs can affect outputs. Frankly, it’s barely coding, it’s adding degrees of specification so a program can do all the work. I get that it took you a while to learn what all of it means and how it works, sort of, but something being hard to do doesn’t make it art.
And don’t cheapen photography by comparing it to generating an AI image. There’s physical labor involved in photography on top of composition and patience.
Part 2
Also, good luck trying to copyright it because guess what, you can’t.
This looks like it’s set to change. The US Copyright Office is proactively exploring and evolving its understanding of this topic and are actively seeking expert and public feedback. You shouldn’t expect this to be their final word on the subject.
It’s also important to remember Copyright Office guidance isn’t law. Their guidance reflects only the office’s interpretation based on experience, it isn’t binding in courts or other parties. Guidance from the office is not a substitute for legal advice, and it does not create any rights or obligations for anyone. They are the lowest rung on the ladder for deciding what law means.
Let’s keep it civil and productive. Jeering dismissive language like “Also, good luck trying to copyright it because guess what, you can’t.” isn’t helping your argument, they’re just mean spirited. Let’s have a civil discussion, even if we disagree. I’m open to keep talking, but I will quit replying if you continue being disrespectful.
Removed by mod
It’s clear where you hold your stakes in the matter and where I hold mine. Whether or not you want to continue the conversation is up to you, but I’m not going to go out my way to be polite in the matter, because I don’t really give a shit either way or if you’re offended by what I say. AI personally affects me and my livelihood, so I do have passionate opinions about its use, how companies are adapting it and how it’s affecting other people like me.
All the article you linked shows is that they held a meeting, which doesn’t really show anything. The government has tons of meetings that don’t amount to shit.
So, instead of arguing whether or not the meeting actually shows they are considering anything different, I will explain my personal views.
In general, I’m not against AI. It is a tool that can be effective in reducing menial tasks and increasing productivity. But, historically, such technology has done nothing but put people out of work and increased profits for the executives and shareholders. At every given chance, creatives and their work are devalued and categorized as “easy”, “childish” or not a real form of work, by those who do not have the capacity to do it themselves.
If a company wants to adapt AI technology for creative use, it should solely trained off of content that they own the copyright to. Most AI models are completely opaque and refuse to disclose the materials they were trained on. Unless they can show me exactly what images were used to generate the output, then I will not trust that the output is unique and not plagiarizing other works.
Fair use has very specific use cases where it’s actually allowed - parody, satire, documentary and educational use, etc. For common people, you can be DMCA’ed or targeted in other ways for even small offenses, like remixes. Even sites like archive.org are constantly under threat by lawsuits. In comparison, AI companies are seemingly being given free pass because of wide adoption, their lack of transparency, and the vagueness as to where specifically the output is being derived from. A lot of AI companies are trying to adapt opt-out to cover their asses, but this is only making our perception of their scraping practices worse.
As we are starting to see with some journalism lawsuits, they are able to specifically point out where their work is being plagiarized, so I hope that more artists will speak up and also file suit for models where their work is blatantly being trained to mimic their styles. Because If someone can file copyright suit against another person for such matters, they should certainly be able to sue a company for the same unauthorized use of their work, when being used for profit.
Have you just woken up from a year long coma? AI can create stunning pictures now.
stunning but uncreative af.
that still depends on the operator.
Yeah and there are tons of angles and gestures for human subjects that AI just can’t figure out still. Any time I’ve seen a “stunning” AI render it’s some giant FOV painting with no real subject or the subject takes up a 12th of the canvas.
Yeah and there are tons of angles and gestures for human subjects that AI just can’t figure out still.
Actually less so because it can’t draw the stuff but because it doesn’t want to on its own, and there’s no way to ask it to do anything different with built-in tools, you have to bring your own.
Say I ask you to draw a car. You’re probably going to do a profile or 3/4th view (is that the right terminology for car portraits?), possibly a head-on, you’re utterly unlikely to draw the car from the top, or from the perspective of a mechanic lying under it.
Combine that tendency to draw cars from a limited set of perspectives because “that’s how you draw cars” with the inability of CLIP (the language model stable diffusion uses) to understand pretty much, well, anything (it’s not a LLM), and you’ll have no chance getting the model to draw the car from a non-standard perspective.
Throw in some other kind of conditioning, though, like a depth map, doesn’t even need to be accurate it can be very rough, the information density equivalent of me gesturing the outline of a car and a camera, and suddenly all kinds of angles are possible. Probably not under the car as the model is unlikely to know much about it, but everything else should work just fine.
SDXL can paint, say, a man in a tuxedo doing one-hand pullups while eating a sandwich with the other. Good luck prompting that only with text, though.
I mean, just like any other tool.
That’s not a tool. A tool is something a mind uses to make something. AI is a generator in and of itself, requiring nothing from a mind.
Of course it does. An AI generator does nothing without a prompt. Give it a bad prompt, and it looks boring and uncreative.
The idea that you can throw anything (or nothing) into a generator and get something good out is a misconception. I’ve played around with generators, and can’t get much “good” out of them. But I’ve seen amazing looking stuff created by others.
yea I’ve also seen amazing stuff created by others. But that’s not what we’re talking about here
It literally is. The person I replied to explicitly said it’s a good tool but has no creativity. I said the creativity comes from the users skill.
If it’s a tool requiring a user to bring it to its full potential… then again thats what is being talked about.
These tools do literally nothing unless a user is involved. Be it setting up auto responses to certain text, or explicitly handing it instructions and tweaking as they go.
I think AI art looks neat
That isn’t art. That’s just commodity.
That won’t get you into art school but it also won’t get you kicked out.
*adjusts horn-rims* yesyes very neat do you have anything else to say but that you’re whimsical?
There are so many possibilities for AI art, to say it’s all bad is painting it all with one brush
Are the Koalas here in the room right now?
