I think that there is AI “art” that goes beyond typing a few words into chat gpt and waiting for a result.
I don’t know how popular this is today but about two years ago I watched lots of people go wild with stable diffusion workflows. It was a whole palette of tools: Control net, Inpainting, sketches with img2img for the composition, corrections in Photoshop and so on. It took hours or days of manual work until people “generated” the image that they initially imagined. I would say that this would count as art… Writing one prompt into your favourite llm and take what you get: not so much.
One example for reference: https://youtu.be/K0ldxCh3cnI
I feel like some promises were broken 😂
I feel like some promises were broken 😂
You’re absolutely right!
tl;dr - “art” generated by LLMs is ultimately lame and uninspiring. It’s probably never going to inspire people very much. It’s a parlor trick and everyone intrinsically recognizes it. Don’t expect to be taken seriously as a creator if this is your primary tool.
It’s generative AI though, not creative. It can literally only create what it’s seen before. It’s incapable of being original. Not that there’s anything wrong with that. Andy Warhol painted soup cans. But anyone who expects inspiration and creativity from generative AI doesn’t understand the technology as it’s applied…
It generates new content based on what is trained on. not just what is trained on
Where is the new part coming from? The new part can only come from combining things it already knows.
And even that is the part that is already provided by the human as part if the prompt.
Just like it can Hallucinate text, it also hallucinates content. That’s a core part of the generative feature
It hallucinates from incorrectly putting other info in its network together. It is all just stochastics.
That is not original or new its is the core of what slop is.
The problem is that it does not have a goal or even just understands why it is doing what it is doing.
I am skeptical about “never”, but right now I agree that’s true. I expect it to be true for many years to come. That being said, we have seen a lot of improvement (over even the last few months) in AI image quality, composition, and prompt adherence.
In order for an art piece to exist, an artist have to have something to say by said art. Fancy autocomplete is not an entity, it’s an algorithm to generate something looking like something else, and even if it crawls out of the uncanny valley at some point (which I’m not sure is possible), the best case scenario is that it will generate something that looks like some people did at some point. It’s not what art is, and it’s not what people look for in art. This will never change, this is the never in said never.
AGI will create art, but at this point we’re further away from it than we were 10 years ago, or even 50 years ago (and I would argue it’s a goos thing)That’s not what I’m saying. What I’m saying is that it’s going to be increasingly difficult (for the layperson) to tell if a work is by a human or computer. You and I may think there’s some sort of moral superiority in human art, but the average TikTok user doesn’t give a fuck… and they outnumber us greatly.
Pregnant Mario lactating Jamba juice all over Blanka from street fighter, indeed.
this reminded me that old Chuck Jones comic in which he encourages young artists to find what works for them instead of trying to fit in.
To me, a big part of it is that I’m tired of commodity art. I don’t care about your pretty pixel soup. I’ve seen other pixel soups before that were similarly pretty.
And I’ve been tired for many years, long before every middle-manager under the sun could cook up their own pretty pixel soup.
Back then, it was humans trying to make a living off of their passion and then settling for commodity art to make ends meet. I was cheering them on, because they were passionate humans.Now that generative AI has destroyed that branch of humanity, there’s no one to cheer on anymore.
Even if generative AI never existed in the first place, I’d like to see commodity art being relegated to the sidelines and expressive art coming into the limelight instead.Tell me a story with your art. About your struggles or a brainfart you had, or really anything. This comic is great, for example. There’s emotions there and I can see the human through the art. I would’ve chosen a very different illustration for whatever, for example, which tells me a lot about the artist, but also about myself.
I have never had that kind of introspection with pretty pixel soups.I find this li’l guy hilarious for some reason.
There are difficult ‘AI’ tools.
Look up controlnet workflows or VACE, just to start, much less little niches in vapoursynth pipelines or image editing layers. You could spend days training them, messing with the implementation, then doing the manual work of carefully and deliberately applying them. This has, in fact, has been happening in film production for awhile, just in disguise.
Same with, say, LLMs used in game mods where appropriate, like the Rimworld mod. That’s careful creative expression.
…As usual, it’s tech bros fucking everything up by dumbing it down to zero-option prompt box and then shoving that in front of as many people as possible to try and monopolize their attention.
In other words, I agree with the author that what I hate about ‘AI art’ is the low effort ‘sloppiness.’ It’s gross, like rotten fast food. It makes me sad. And that’s 99.999% of all AI art.
…But it doesn’t have to be like that.
It’s like saying the concept of the the fediverse sucks because Twitter/Facebook suck, even if 99.999% of what folks see is the slop of the later. It’s not fair to the techniques, and it’s not holding the jerks behind mass slop proliferation accountable.
Precisely. AI art is bad because the users making “art” with it essentially have such bad taste they’ll publish anything the AI shits out.
There exist artistic ways to use AI as a tool, but none of them are easy. In fact they might be harder than just painting the damn picture yourself.
based and real-pilled, the both of you.
i’m excited for the future of art. we have the potential for a new age of renaissance men who master the arts, humanities, and sciences all at once.
i think a lot of people shitting on genAI don’t see engineering itself as art… and i think that’s a piss-poor, deathly sad view of this world. it’s like 2/3 of westerners weirdly resent anything “math or science coded” as they might call it. a shame. a damn shame.
I have never seen particular humans expressing themselves in ai art or music, all i see is the tech company model behind it; be it sora, stable diffusion or mid journey, ai is not a tool for the prompters; the prompters are the tool for the AI model.
I like this take. It sums up the reality of AI quite well.
Gotta say, he lost me at the talent-skill thing. Being good at any arts requires something fundamental. Practise is absolutely an important part of it, but art, music, storytelling, anything creative, either you got it or you dont.
Edit : is the down arrows because talent isnt real, or because I said he and mistakenly did a misgendering?
I don’t think this is worth a downvote, but I do think you are fundamentally wrong.
either you got it or you don’t
People who are born with natural talents, that others can’t hope to match with practice, are definitely real, but they are VERY rare. Think people like Mozart or Picasso. People who just start out naturally understanding an art or skill in ways that others have to LEARN to achieve.
But “talent” for most people is more akin to “liking” a pursuit, rather than being naturally good at it. They GET good at it by DOING it constantly, because it’s what they like doing. In this context of “talent”, “talented” people can absolutely be matched by “untalented” people, who put in the same work and effort, but driven by other motivations. This is what people mean when they say “You can do anything you set your mind to.”
And yes, this includes creativity. Creativity is a skill that most creative people had to WORK on to get good at.
Skilled people are not born that way. You can be predisposed towards certain skills, and you can even argue that only some people can be the best at something, but all those can do is decrease the amount of time it takes to become skilled. No matter what, you can learn to do something. You can learn to draw. You can learn to write. You can learn to tell stories. You can learn to be creative. You can become skilled at most things. You may not be able to be the best, but practice will always get you closer to best than predisposition. You are literally not just born with it.
I don’t think this is worth a downvote, but I do think you are fundamentally wrong.
either you got it or you don’t
Please who are born with natural talents, that others can’t hope to match with practice, are definitely real, but they are VERY rare. Think people like Mozart or Picasso. People who just start out naturally understanding an art or skill in ways that others have to LEARN to achieve.
But “talent” for most people is more akin to “liking” a pursuit, rather than being naturally good at it. They GET good at it by DOING it constantly, because it’s what they like doing. In this context of “talent”, “talented” people can absolutely be matched by “untalented” people, who put in the same work and effort, but driven by other motivations. This is what people mean when they say “You can do anything you set your mind to.”
Some of the best artists I know are people who started out without a single iota of talent, but they practiced for long enough that they got good. I reckon that talent probably does exist, but it’s a far smaller component than many believe. Hard word beats talent when talent doesn’t work hard.
People who are most likely to emphasise talent in art tend to be people who wish they were good at art, but aren’t willing (or able) to put the time into improving; it feels oddly reassuring to tell oneself that it’s pointless to try if you don’t start out with talent, rather than being realistic and saying “I wish I were good at art, but I am choosing not to invest in that skill because it’s not one of my priorities”
Maybe, but i feel the amount of effort I put in before giving up should have yielded a lot more results than it did. I dont want to come across as bitter, because its just art, but i really do think some people just cant.
If Mozart can be writing unrivalled symphonies at 8 years old you know. Most people will play a single instrument for longer than he was alive and come nowhere close, and its frustrating to learn that the general consensus is that this is simply because everyone else just needs to try harder.
don’t listen to others, “everyone can do X” is one of those technically true unfalsifiable statements people tell themselves to soothe their bad feelings about their own mediocrity.
you’re right that it isn’t just a matter of will or effort, some people are born into incorrigibly better positions to become the next Mozart or Einstein. the truth is that in this world the majority of your fate is not written by you and it never will be - and that’s okay.
maybe one day people will get off their weird “personal responsibility” high-horse, but until then…
That’s not the general consensus, you just need to stop comparing yourself to literal prodigies. In fact, stop comparing yourself to anyone. If you don’t have expectations for your art, you’ll never fail to meet them.
I wasn’t literally comparing myself, it wasnt “wahhh im not a subject-defining god what’s the point”, it was more “if an 8 year old child can be that good, then there has to be some factor beyond effort”
I think it’s more nuanced, like unless of a particular handicap pratice will make you good. But being exceptional requires something that is a closely guarded secret by the gods. So yeah, like the succesful actor on a talk show talking about working hard to get at your dreams sorts of diminish the hard work of anyone who doesn’t reach the top. So yeah, talent is honed but exceptional talent is not.
When I mentioned this in the last posting i was thoroughly downvoted, my downs were mostly artists adamant that anyone can be great at art if they just put in the effort. Many claimed to have full aphantasia and more or less tried to pin it on my inability to draw to work ethic or being too hard on my great art that I never presented to anyone.
I think it’s a general condition that most artists project their abilities and believe that anyone can do what they’re doing.
Like right there with FridaySteve@lemmy.world’s downvote on this comment, something that actually happened as was clearly reported to me in a previous post.
At least you’re not bitter about it 🙄🙄🙄
;) not even once
The Oatmeal! 😍😍 I haven’t been to that site in so long, I’m so glad they’re still around! Thanks for sharing!
Growing up my mother had (still has come to think of it) a book about Wyeth at the Kuerner family farm. The Wyeth picture in the Oatmeal story is not part of the larger collection of works all from that farm, but it still has the feeling. I can’t reccomend people looking into Wyeth and his art high enough
Art is beautiful not because economic value has been captured and skewered into aesthetics. It is a part of being human.
Yea, I agree. It is like the anti-ai art luddites don’t understand this… The people making the promps are still making art, just by the nature of it being humans making human decisions. Skill isn’t a gate to art in the same way anymore, despite what the gatekeepers want everyone to believe.
Are you the type of person who pretends you made a cheeseburger when you got it from a drive though window? Because that’s what you sound like.
Prompters don’t make decisions in the piece, the algorithm generated stuff and if the prompter doesn’t like it, then they prompt again. No choices made.
It’s like how you all use the same words when someone disagrees with you, “luddite” and “gatekeeping”. You can’t really think for yourself so your regurgitate what someone else wrote.
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Okay, I’m willing to accept that we generally shouldn’t decide that our personal lines in the sand can serve as meaningful differentiators between art and not-art. By the same token, don’t expect me to be particularly impressed by a (mostly) photorealistic composition just because you spent 30 minutes fine-tuning your prompt. If I’m not appreciating your skill and the time you committed to your vision, the bar for the impact you need to make is that much higher. For me, most AI art falls flat on that front as well.
Maybe someone will be the breakthrough artist that shows the rest of us luddites what a genuinely beautiful interplay between drafting a prompt and massaging an engine will look like, but (1) even that person is something other than a painter or a photographer, and (2) I don’t think we’re there yet and may never be.
That is at least reasonable. I really don’t expect you to be impressed by anybody’s efforts in AI prompting. Calling it not-art is subjectively wrong, but not being impressed is right in most cases.
art - the expression or application of human creative skill and imagination
Not-art is subjectively right. AI “art” is made by taking imagery and reassembling it according to an algorithm. There’s no thought, no imagination, no anything creative behind it. Can it be aesthetically pleasing? Sure, like a sunset can be. But neither are art because there’s no intention behind it.
Is a picture of a sunset art? If the photographer chose a particularly scenic view and took several pictures before deciding on the one they felt was best, is that not art? Does the photographer have to, personally, hike to find the vantage point and take the picture for it to be art? Can they use a drone instead? How about just feeds from a camera someone set up? If the person looks through a feed and takes some high quality screenshots of a particularly vivid sunset that moves them, and decides to frame it and display it, is it disqualified from being art because they didn’t create the sunset and just selected the image from a series of images they were looking at? Is it slop if they decide to digitally remove a tree that was blocking the view?
This is the problem I have. Every argument against AI art inevitably closes the door against some other form of art that the arguer would otherwise consider acceptable. I know you’re not going to like or accept this answer, but the reason it’s so hard to have an argument that only applies to AI art and not any other forms of art is because AI art IS art.
It’s art, because art is subjective. The moment you start trying to define it or gatekeep it, the meaning will slip through your fingers like grains of sand.
Is a picture of a sunset art?
Yes, IF the photographer chose the framing, angle, lighting etc. of the picture. If it was randomly taken by a drone or if someone just thrust out a camera and started blindly taking pictures, that’s not art. UNLESS the person was trying to make some sort of statement about how randomly taken pictures look. Again, it’s all about intent more than the actual composition. There has to be some sort of underlying idea that’s being expressed. AI cannot have ideas.
I’ll answer each of the questions because I find thinking about it interesting:
If the photographer chose a particularly scenic view and took several pictures before deciding on the one they felt was best, is that not art?
Yes, explained above.
Does the photographer have to, personally, hike to find the vantage point and take the picture for it to be art?
No. They can take any picture they have specifically chosen to take the way they took it.
Can they use a drone instead?
Yes. The method used doesn’t matter, the fact that they chose the picture to look the way is does is what matters.
How about just feeds from a camera someone set up?
If they stopped it at a certain point and chose that framing for a reason, not random chance, then yes.
If the person looks through a feed and takes some high quality screenshots of a particularly vivid sunset that moves them, and decides to frame it and display it, is it disqualified from being art because they didn’t create the sunset and just selected the image from a series of images they were looking at?
This one is a really good question if the video feed is presumed to be an automated one not shot by a person and was not set up to capture the sunset or anything in particular. There was no intent behind the images being captured, it’s just a recording of what things looked like in a specific place at a specific time. Yet a person could choose one of these random images and decide they liked the composition. Would the aesthetically pleasing image being hung on a wall be art? Well, would a seashell chosen from a beach for its appearance and put on display be art? I would say no, the picture or seashell themselves both qualify as decorations, not art. However, their chosen placement in a space is a form of art. So AI generated images (or anything at all, really) could be made into a component of art even if the individual parts are not themselves art.
Is it slop if they decide to digitally remove a tree that was blocking the view?
Totally depends on how extensive the change is if AI is creating the image where the tree used to be.
Where is this definition from? Somewhere official, or your own personal definition?
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People using prompts are not “making” art. They are hallucinating theft from actual artists. There never was any skill or materials gate. Pen or pencil and a scrap of paper., pick it up and start. There is no defense for AI “art” or the shills that push it.
If you use summary tools on google to make you a list or a paragraph you’re ripping off actual writers and stealing their collective style. (Language models don’t just come from nowhere after all) Spell check is ok, but if you write like you’re borderline illiterate, well, pick up a grammar book and a notepad and get cracking. Hire a professional editor to plan your next set of PowerPoint slides.
Sheesh.
There is nothing new under the sun, even artists who draw their own stuff learn from other artists and use it in their art. AI training isn’t theft as long as the art is free to look at, that is just sour grapes. Torrenting anything and using it either as inspiration for your own work, or for training AI is theft and shouldn’t be done by anybody, but especially not corporations. Either way, it isn’t the training that is theft.
Prompting does not make anything, it is like saying you cooked a meal because you picked it in a vending machine.
It is more like writing a recipee down and giving it to a chef who uses their skill to interpret the recipe and make a new dish. The dish doesn’t belong wholly to the chef, despite the skill nearly wholly residing with the chef. The person who wrote the recipee isn’t a chef, but they are involved in making the dish that was their idea.
Yeah but we don’t say “I made these cookies” when all we did was hand someone the recipe, now do we?
No, because telling someone or something to make something doesn’t mean we get to say we made it.
So you are saying that the person who made the recipe had no input to the process of cooking the resultant food? Nobody claims they “drew” something when they design an AI prompt. When you see a Frank Lloyd Write building do you say, "Nah he didn’t build that, he just made some plans. A contractor built it. Frank Lloyd Write isn’t an artist, he is just a prompt writer. "
Don’t break your arm patting yourself on the back for putting an order in at the restaurant. That chef would make something with or without you.
Lmao about you trying to compare ai prompters to Frank Lloyd Write, when he actually did the design work and you can’t.
Oh, sorry, you’re right, prompters never say they drew something, they just claim to be artists when they clearly aren’t. Should’ve figured you’d nitpick word choices it’s about the only think you’re capable of.
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Found the tool!
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I don’t like ai-art, most of the time it is a pursuit of the economic value of an aesthetic without a genuine engagement with the human part.
Further, AI is part of a broad process of dehumanization that diminishes the value of humans and the human condition in favor of an imagined intelligence that all artists have always instinctually understood was a threat.
No artists with any wisdom at all thinks skill is a gatekeeper for human artists, skill is rather the inveitable result of a sustained intimacy between an artist and their art and what you mistake for a worship of skill is a love of that relationship framed in the context of skill. In so far as the obsession with artistic skill acts as a gatekeeper to anybody, it is in large part because capitalism demands things be abstracted and reduced to pure economic value. Artists rarely gatekeep art themselves, the gatekeeping has NOTHING to do with artists nor does it originate from their desire to create art it is a peripheral process imposed upon art by distorting forces attempting to control art (such as AI).
Also, people need to stop lazily using the example of Luddites without knowing their history. They aren’t who you think they were, stop dropping the reference like you know what it means if you don’t know what it means.
TL;DR If skill is a gatekeeper to art it is because capitalism demands scarcity be imposed upon the pursuit of making art, it has nothing to do with art itself. Hailing AI as a gift to would-be artists totally misses the point, I am not against using new tools to make art, I am against the rise in dehumanization dominating societies around the world at the moment of which AI is a central actor.
Walther Benjamin examines this point extensively in The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction, which should be required reading for everyone, but especially anyone who thinks that AI art is the same as human art. The crux is that an authentic work (you can think of it as the “original”) has some… thing , some Je ne sais quoi that he calls the Aura. It’s a feeling you get from the real authentic thing. It’s the reason people line up at the Louvre to see the tiny Mona Lisa behind thick plate glass instead of just looking at a poster. Or why NFTs tried to be a thing and basically failed after the meme of it all died out.
Unexpected mention of Allie Brosh in the thanks at the end. Genuinely nice to be able to confirm she’s still out there, alive and kicking, doing whatever it is she’s doing now.
She wrote a book a couple years back that explains where she vanished to. It’s good.
She’s written a couple, at least. Þe two I have are boþ good.
