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01: A girl labeled ‘Artists’ is holding a drawing tablet and pen under her arm. She is wearing round glasses and a blue sweatshirt. She has messy dark-brown hair and a brown skin-tone. She says “We don’t really wanna MAKE A.I. art.”
02: A guy labeled ‘Art Enjoyers’ holds his hand out while speaking. She is wearing a purple and yellow hawaiian shirt with a floral pattern over a white t-shirt, and has red hair and a light skin-tone. He says “We don’t really wanna SEE A.I. art.”
03: Behind them both, there is a cute girl in a business suit with a pink tie. She is blushing a bit and has pink eyeshadow, and looks upset. Her messy shoulder-length hair is parted in the middle, and held by two hairclips: one that looks like a red arrow pointing down, and one that looks like a green arrow pointing up. She says “Um … I-Isn’t there someone you forgot to ask?” She is labeled ‘Shareholders’.
04: She puffs up her cheeks and pouts, a tear is on the verge of falling from one of her eyes. ‘Artist Enjoyers’ Guy is now in front of her yelling “AH!! SHAREHOLDERS-CHAN!!” while ‘Artists’ Girl is in front of her yelling “WE’RE SORRY WE HURT YOU!!!”
Why don’t you just make your own art. Then you can be an artist. You want to be an artist, but you don’t want to make art, so you don’t actually want to be an artist.
I don’t care how bad it is. Whatever you make is better than the soulless garbage LLMs make. Just start doing it if you actually want to.
not everyone want to put in effort to get a desirable result.
art is a product just like a tire or sheet of paper.
Sure, and you’ll be treated like someone who doesn’t want to spend any money or put any effort into it: useless. Whatever is generated won’t have any life to it because there wasn’t intent with the creation processes; only a statistical algorithm.
Art isn’t just a product. Sure, it can be, but how many people are making comics or memes online and aren’t being paid? There’s a ton. That proves it’s more than just a product, because a product is made to be sold. It can be a product, but it often isn’t, and even when it is that’s only a part of it.
No one is going to pay for something they can just generate themselves, so AI “art” is not even a product. It’s worthless, and a sink of resources to create.
if you aren’t being paid to do it then it’s a hobby and that’s ok, but papermaking is a hobby too and that doesn’t make paper any less of a commodity.
Art is a subjective expression. What is a tire or sheet of paper trying to express?
Also, desirable results require effort, that’s a simple fact, you’d be stupid to think or expect otherwise.
Could be any number of things. An extreme attention to detail, a production process with a political message, an innovative use of materials, etc… Putting artificial limits on which human creations are allowed to be fulfilling and engaging is foolish.
Nothing about the use of AI or any other technology/tool/process precludes effort. A vast majority of pictures taken in the world today are disposal trash, but that doesn’t mean you can’t make meaningful art with your iPhone.
I disagree.
My eyes are rolling out of my skull 🙄
They never claimed to want to be an artist, much less fit your definition of one. A movie producer might “make art” but they just care about the output and not using their job as a creative outlet.
I do. And one of the tools in my box is a diffusion model. Why shouldn’t it be in there?
An A.I.-Generated Picture Won an Art Prize.
I’m going to try a different tactic here, in that I don’t expect I can convince you of anything on the other side of the argument that you’re engaging with, but something that might be useful to learn from is some constructive criticism of the works that the AI produces. In doing so I’m going to try to avoid what I think a lot of proponents of your style consider gatekeeping.
The piece that won this competition is technically sound, it has an aesthetic presence, we can agree here. If anything AI is kinda good at doing this because it’s trained to recognize the patterns that lead to this in the data and other artwork that was used to train this.
I’ll also even say that if someone spent 80 hours cumulatively taking 900 photographs of a particular scene to try to select just one that’s of particular quality, that we might even say they put in artistic effort into it. It’s just that that alone, the time and effort spent on curating a work, is not all there is that defines it as artistic. In this other case you keep posting about found art, a urinal that someone spent maybe 5 seconds on is also considered art.
It’s also true though that when that guy described the urinal and why he thought it deserved to be considered art, that he put thought into that. He made the selections he did for a reason.
So lets go back to our award winner. It’s competent, we agree, enough that a judge didn’t even realize it might be AI (I’ll get to that in a second). I’ll even say that the fact that the winner could add in an entire head on one of the characters in the pieces and have it blend well enough with the shading and lighting of the work suggests the guy who won with this piece probably knows at least some degree of traditional art concepts.
We can also see that it’s a blend of styles, the composition looks even renaissance a bit, and clearly also the person who submitted this knew enough about other art forms to recognize that. There remains one major question though: what story is this picture telling? The renaissance images that it’s an homage to are generally based on the moment in some story. A picture of Napoleon on a horse isn’t just Napoleon on a horse, there’s usually indications that he’s maybe returning from some battle. Images of Samson and Delilah focus on the moment she attempts the assassination.
That’s what people are trying to get at here. The artist says that his prompt was to make a mashup of styles (victorian and space themes, which does not seem even remotely like what he ended up with), and then refined it further with the lighting and shading, positioning and elements. I can agree this takes effort, it’s just also this is like saying the movie Wild Wild West should have won critically acclaimed awards for the cinematography. Even where he had intent, it seems like it was overwritten by the very tool he used, and it seems like he didn’t believe enough in his own original vision that he noticed that it wasn’t actually what he asked for.
So lets get to the judge then. I think there would be very real outcry if say, a judge for a oil painting competition was unable to tell the difference between an the works made in the requested medium and a photograph that was submitted for it. I could see an argument, much like for how photography was separated out from other artforms in competition, that the same should be done for AI. In addition, I think that the effort to make the AI emulate existing styles and convince people it was made with previously existing tools actually limits the possibility of what the style can create. Almost a decade ago, people were fascinated by google deep dreams because it was a machine creating a rendition of how the machine “thinks,” and showing all the strange symbolism and logical connections that were programmed into it and how they had developed, in a way very different than anything a human artist might think or do. I think that’s the envelope people and AI should be pushing here, I think it should be a completely different category, I think it should have it’s completely own style.
I also think the current AI programs suck for a variety of ethical reasons I won’t get into, but I don’t rule out that there couldn’t be versions made that lack those problems and aren’t just an gimme to corporations looking to streamline every process on the cheap. But if you want AI to be taken seriously, if you want anything you try to make with it to be taken seriously, these are all thoughts you should probably consider.
A well written and thoughtful response. Thank you. I disagree with nothing.
Current AI Diffusion models are absolutely nothing like thinking and the composition is very likely a mixture of creator choice and training on nicely composed pictures.
It does seem that an AI tool is useful for artists, but certainly everything it spits out isn’t art.
You don’t make art then. You ask something else to make it for you, and it will be valueless. If I hire an artist online to create something for me, I don’t create the piece of art. They do. How does that logic differ if that is an LLM or an artist? You aren’t the one with the knowledge or skill, so you aren’t an artist. You’re a hack who wants to pass other’s work off as their own because you’re too lazy or lack the creativity to do it yourself. You’re pitiable, if you weren’t causing harm.
What are you on about? Who are you to tell people what they can and can’t find value in?
You’re making a hell of a leap here.