Now I’m wondering if this was done by a bad AI pretending to be a good artist or a good artist pretending to be a bad AI.
Poe’s law is evolving!
AI “art” isn’t art. It’s just a trash bag of pieces pulled from real work that was sucked up into the model to learn from without any consent from the originators of said art. It’s fun to work with if you need inspiration to actually create art from, but it’s trash otherwise. I don’t mind people showing it off, but if you think you’re a genius because you typed a handful of prompts into a tool that far smarter people than you created, you’re on par with NFT and crypto folks. They seek the shortest route to success because they don’t want to put in the work. Art is organic and rooted in the emotion and experiences of living beings. It’s grounded in reality and understands that a human hand should have 5 digits on it and why.
It’s insanely complex and I don’t condemn the tech or the smart folks that create it, but what it generates is missing all of the organic factors that give art life. It’s being harnessed by capitalists to shut the human artists out, when it should instead be used by those artists as a tool to make their work easier.
Source: I’ve used multiple generators and have built software that uses ChatGPT and DALL-E. I’m also a digital artist.
I feel like that applies to most art.
Effort and feeling rarely show in the final piece, because most people aren’t good artists and even good artists don’t usually produce good art. Even what’s “good” here is subjective.I tend to agree that AI art isn’t art in the way that we usually mean it, but also this is turning into a big grey area because people are using AI for touchups and stuff. Mixed media and photomontage artists have a field day I’m sure.
It really shines in things like photo retouching. The fact that you can tell it to simply erase an object is mind blowing. That’s something I had to spend hours doing manually years ago. It makes filter effects when doing digital art a breeze. That’s why I say it works better as a tool the artist collaborates with, vs making entirely from scratch. That coupling has been the perfect balance.
I use GitHub Copilot on a daily basis and it makes repetitive tasks much easier to work through. I don’t want it to write my code for me; I want it to make my work easier. The same applies in other disciplines.
This article explains it well. Marx’s theory was that the advancements of technology and manufacturing should be things that the worker maintains and works alongside with, vs a replacement for the worker. That’s where capitalism chimes in and is ruining the AI movement. It wants to eliminate the human aspect, which then removes any life. Cranking out hotel room art with AI serves a far different purpose than someone making paintings to be sold in a gallery.
Art is always going to be subjective, but part of what makes art is the sentience of the beings making it. The mass-produced AI imagery we’re seeing today is just a mix of corporate-driven plagiarism.
I absolutely agree with this take.
If AI output is or isn’t art isn’t an important question; what we should be asking is “does AI help artists and individuals realize their intent, or does it help the shareholders/owners take an even bigger slice of the pie?”
Yeah, it’s not the subject matter itself; it’s the way that subject matter is being bastardized. I would be a total jerk to dismiss AI as a whole. I know people that have worked with it for years in the LLM space, and they are far and away more brilliant than I could ever wish to be.
Calling pieces where an artist used an “AI” to do things like touchups “AI art” is like calling a piece where somebody used the magic wand tool “Magic Wand art.” Because that’s what the magic wand is - an algorithm written to identify similar elements and isolate them. That’s essentially the beginning steps of an LLM. “AI” has been used in this regard for decades now, it’s only that AI has become a buzz word for companies looking to replace worker skills with a cheap fascimile so that they don’t have to pay their workers that has led to the concept of “AI art,” by which it can be safely assumed is referring to generated images.
And I believe the word that OP was looking for is intent. As Adam Savage put it, AI art lacks intent. Whether a piece is good or bad doesn’t matter, you can feel what the artist had in their head and what they wanted to express with a piece, and that’s what he cares about when looking at a piece of art. When a 6 year old draws a dog, it doesn’t matter whether that dog is a stick figure or a work comparable to the Mona Lisa - you know that they wanted to express that they like dogs. AI has no intent. It simply combines pieces of its data set, transforming art created with intent into a pile of different details that no longer have their original context.
I disagree that you can feel the intent in the painting of a 6yo more than you can feel the intent behind the prompt in an AI generated image. The person making the prompt has intent.
If the intent of a painting was evident, then there wouldn’t be so much backlash against abstract art, and debate about what art means.
All I was trying to say is that “AI assistance” has become a sliding scale all the way from simple tools like intelligent select tools, to complete image generation, and all kinds of points in between (eg: smart-erase, uncrop, in painting to add entirely new things) so it’s difficult to draw a clear line between what is and what isn’t “AI art”
You’re on par with NFT and crypto folks.
They don’t really care, they think they are “innovating” by doing this. I mean, this is a genuine question: why are they so amazed by an algorithm like this when they never did any art in their life? Aren’t they busy coding or “X’ing” with their checkmarks?
You’re telling me this is lifeless and inorganic?
It’s sterile as fuck. It looks like every single image I see AI blogs pump out for clickbait articles. It has no sense of lighting and the smiles are Uncanny Valley territory.
Edit: Guy on the right has the wrong number of fingers.
This looks like a ham-fisted corporate propaganda pic, so yes.
Yes.
Like fuck I’m I going to remember this after closing this thread.
Unequivocally, yes.
This is legit worse than any corporate art styles.
While I think it’s extremely overhyped, looking at some “AI” art communities it’s clear that at least some put a lot of effort on it, going over many many iterations and tweaking the program and the results.
And anyway art is “made” by the observer, not the artist, even the results of natural processes can be art.
(AI in quotes because these tools don’t deserve the name, at best High Coherence Media Transformers)
We sure do not have the same definition of art!
Art does not, in my opinion, need an observer to be art.
If you think the sky is beautiful then that does not make it art, or everything would be art so nothing would be art.
everything would be art so nothing would be art
A lot of artists share that thought
That everything is art ? Or that everything can be art?
If everything is art, AI art is art, and that’s obviously a disgusting communist lie. Where’s the line?
I like to think that anything that CAN be art, if it can be meaningful for someone.
A pebble might be ignored by most people, but a geologist might be fascinated by it, I think that becomes art.
Even in something worked-on at the very least the artist is the observer, and they will put into it the meaning they perceive in it, and if they never share with anyone it’s still art.
My opinion.
OP put the crack pipe down.
Them fingers look like toes
omg, you’re right! The “hand” on the left looks like a foot.
I’m all jelly of his multi-layered shark teeth. What a way to save a lot of money and stress.
It’s sad to see so many people saying that AI generated pictures are art. At the end of the day, if you don’t get why art is important, you don’t get it. Gonna be hard to explain to Elon’s fans why the human aspect of art matters, so why bother?
I respectfully disagree with you saying ai generated images are not art, it is “a form” of art, and saying so doesn’t equate to saying art is unimportant or that the human aspect doesn’t matter. Art is important, the human aspect does matter a great deal. Art is about ideas and means to express them, AI-gen does allow it in different ways than previously but right now you still have a sentient being with an idea to prompt the AI.
What you are saying looks a lot like what people used to say about photography not being art, and fear mongering about photography replacing other forms of art like painting. The opposite happened, photography shaped into its own form of art, and painting evolved to new era of amazing ideas.
Exactly! It’s a new kind of canvass that just has a few crappy brushes, and while far too many people are just copying existing art with extra steps, eventually we’ll make better brushes and new paints and explore the possibilities for real.
Let’s make the term “AI images” be more popular instead
OP when someone has fun playing around with AI generators, and wants to share the nicer looking results they got:
That’s fine, but ai “artists” act like their prompts(and even the images they didn’t do shit to make) are things they put their heart and soul into and get so mad that they have any people calling them out
Personally I haven’t seen any of that, just a lot of people butthurt (or scared for their livelyhood) that others can now make pictures with little effort.
Also some of these generated pics are the result of hundreds of trial-and-error attempts changing up the dozens of parameters and running multiple pieces of software in sequence to get the AI to spit out the wanted result.
The “Anti-AI” crowd tends to be completely ignorant on how this stuff actually works.
And some people have turned this AI stuff into their hobby, so they get defensive when you shit on them (“calling them out” as you word it)
Yeah, finding the right prompt is hard work that requires years of training 🤡
Yeah, misconstruing my comment in one sentence and slapping on a clown emoji thinking that is a genious comeback is hard work that requires years of training
Thanks for noticing!
Maybe it does, and that’s why they all suck right now lol
It’s fine to have AI stuff as a hobby but I’m sorry; AI generated art has no business in an art gallery with human art.
Rent/host your own spaces, open your own galleries, hold your own events. No one is saying that people can’t engage with AI art. What they’re saying is that the effort to legitimize AI art as an equal to human art is incredibly damaging and cancerous.
It’s like asking someone to make you a sandwich and then stipulating what you want on the sandwich then, once the sandwich is on a plate in front of you, you proudly exclaim “Wow, I’m quite the chef, aren’t I?”
The sandwich maker in this case is just not a person, it’s a computer.
I compare it to commissioning a piece and then bragging about how much effort you put into it. But that’s also a really good analogy
Looking at it a different way, that would be like a photographer taking a photo of the sandwich and proclaiming “I’m an artist” or a director telling a chef what to make, telling a cinematographer/camera operator how to shoot it, and an editor how to cut it to create a short film of a sandwich and proclaiming “I’m an artist”. Art can be made from a series of creative and purposeful decisions that result in a piece of expression. It might not be good art, it might not be effortful art, it might even be unethically made art, but it’s not not-art.
The parallels to film directing are uncanny. Idk why people consider that an art either. Not sarcasm, film directing isn’t art for the exact same reason AI images aren’t art.
That certainly is an opinion
How far does the artist have to be removed from the art before they’re no longer considered an artist?
Is it even meaningful to ask if something is art, when anything can be art and art is subjective? It seems more important to ask who a given tool is helping.
I’m not suggesting that the director has full responsibility for the art. They are part of a team, and the creative style of a director heavily influences the finished product. You can tell who directed a movie just by watching it. There are very important creative decisions and directions that point the team of more specialized artists in the right direction.
This is not analogous to AI art. That would be like the director of a movie telling a team of interns to cut together clips of other movies as best they see fit, within a general outline of the script. A person using AI to generate art isn’t part of the creative process in the same way; they tell a machine what to do, and decide whether to rerun or tweak the prompt after seeing the result. This takes some small modicum of creativity, but it isn’t creating art. It’s fine for fun, or to use as a stand in tool, or to mock-up designs, but it will never have the creative direction of a human being, or stand on the same level with true masters, regardless of how well it can copy their style. It can’t understand the art.
Directing is an art form of its own. The cinematography, the pacing, the set design, acting, and so much more is all influenced by the director’s decisions. It would be like saying a conductor or a music producer isn’t an artist. Easy to say if you don’t have an understanding of the art form, but dead wrong. There are a ton of creative choices at all levels made by directors, and there’s a reason we’ve been using them in one way or another since we first started performance art. I’ve worked under and beside directors in the past, and I have only the utmost respect for what a good director can do for the art.
A bad director however… I might agree with you.
This still seems very analogous to me.
For example, when you say
they tell a machine what to do, and decide whether to rerun or tweak the prompt after seeing the result
Replace “machine” with “film crew”, “rerun” with “do another take”, and “tweak the prompt” with “provide notes”. If they’re giving notes to a computer or a person doesn’t really change the nature of their work, only the language they use to provide those notes.
Just like there are bad directors, there are bad AI artists.
And just like I’m sure there was a surge of bad directors when digital video made lowered the skill and cost bar to film making (see: YouTube), so to is there a surge of bad “artists” now that AI has lowered the skill and cost bar for aesthetic image creation.I don’t think that some AI art produced by some random idiot is really art, just like I don’t think that making a backyard YouTube video makes you a director. But I don’t want to automatically discount something as art just because it was fully or partially made using AI.
But like I said, I don’t actually think this is an important question. If something is art is a question that everyone has to answer individually, and there will simply be no demand for things that people don’t view as art.
Instead the question is about who does AI help? Does it help people who might otherwise be unable to bring their creative ideas/vision to life? Or does it help a bunch of corporate overlords lay off a bunch of creative staff so that they can get big bonuses and pay their shareholders big dividends?If you think that this:
Replace “machine” with “film crew”, “rerun” with “do another take”, and “tweak the prompt” with “provide notes”. If they’re giving notes to a computer or a person doesn’t really change the nature of their work, only the language they use to provide those notes.
is what a director does? You have no clue what you’re talking about. They’re far more involved in the creative process on every level than you understand.
Your question about who AI helps is a valid one. I agree that that’s what’s important about AI use. I use AI in my work, but not to replace human beings, but as a tool to make easy mock ups or test ideas. I find trying to replace human creativity in a way that replaces jobs or the human spark that makes art, art, abhorrent. AI art cannot exist without humans to train on, so humans cannot be fully replaced, but I hope to never see a day where AI takes the positions of well compensated artists leeching off the work of unpaid or underpaid humans.
“This artform that I don’t have a hope in hell of ever understanding is invalid… because I say so.”
Better stop watching movies and tv and only ever go to your local playhouse for entertainment.
All your criticisms here you could level at AI image/video generation too. Doubly so since art is subjective.
That would also make a corporate exec meddling with the production to meet their expectations as artists…
Yup. That’s why I’m skeptical of directors are artists.
Or, more accurately, I don’t think you can get a clear black and white answer about if someone is an artist or something is art.
It’s probably more like a grey area, a sliding scale.I think we’re looking at this question wrong anyways. Anything can be art, this is just a tool and in the hands of an artist it will contribute to the creation of art.
The question is: is this a net benefit for society? Is it helping new/hidden artists create art that they otherwise couldn’t? Or is it making the life of the artist harder by fucking up the job market? Both?
Still more “art” to it than most of modern “art” 😁
This statement is objectively wrong.
Technically, the impressionist and surrealist movements are modern art. But I bet you marvel at Monet’s pieces
I guess he’s confounding with “art contemporain” or post moderism.
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You should check out this article on the attacks on paintings by Jewish American artist Barnett Newman. Especially this quote on the piece Who’s Afraid of Red, Yellow, and Blue III, which is basically just an 8’ by 18’ block of red with a blue stripe:
After the 1986 attack on Who’s Afraid of Red, Yellow, and Blue III there was a conversation concerning who would do the restoration of the painting. Despite the work provoking a lot of anger in museumgoers due to its simplicity, the painting was incredibly intricate, and experts knew that it would be nearly unattainable to complete a faithful restoration. Although the work was mostly just an expanse of the color red, both the shade and technique Newman used were difficult to replicate. Prior to the slashing, it was almost impossible to see brush strokes on the work with the naked eye. Additionally, one of the cardinal rules of restoring paintings is that everything done to the work should be reversible, something that would be very difficult to do with such large cuts through the body of the work. The painting sat damaged for many years because no conservationists wanted to touch it.
The dude who did eventually volunteer to restore it more or less went over the entire painting with a roller and red paint, and you can tell immediately.
Me when people are lying about images being generated works and submitting them to art contests and winning stuff like college scholarships:
AI “Artists” are idea guys. They don’t care about the process or the knowledge or the experience of creation, only the Content that gets produced that they can consume. They’re middle managers claiming the work created by the skills of the workers under them as their own effort. Image generators simply allow them to do a corporation and avoid paying people for those skills or putting in the effort to learn themselves. It’s just a new form of coloring books, only created using ethically dubious methods because the companies creating the programs are likely violating fair use laws.
Edit: This isn’t to say that people who use coloring books are inherently bad or anything, but when you’re trying to pass your page from a coloring book off as a gallery-worthy exhibit and the book was made by a company tracing artwork and using it without permission to make a profit? Yeah, then you’re a bad person. Especially if you go on to talk down to artists because you made yours so quickly, etc.
I think AI art is comparable to photography. Photographers do a lot of work behind the scenes to get everything set up, the equipment, lighting, angles, lenses, etc, But at the end of the day, the only action they’re taking to capture the art is they press a button, it’s not nearly the same amount of work that a painter or a musician puts into their art. So I think the idea of “capturing” art is still a valid thing. Sometimes a photographer can capture an award-winning masterpiece with a spur-of-the-moment photo on some shitty disposable camera. Maybe it took them 1000 bad photos to get that one photo, but they still just captured it from somewhere else, they didn’t create the work.
Similarly with AI, a person may have to work with the AI software to setup and craft the prompt that will eventually generate the art, then there may be dozens of iterations of that and fine-tuning to get the result they’re imagining, and even after that there may be some photoshopping involved to get it to where they want it. They’re capturing artwork from a source that may not be their own creation, just the same as photographers. I think AI art is just as legitimate as other forms of art, it’s just open to a wider range of people that can participate because many of the physical hurdles (equipment, space, time, lighting, etc) are not as much of an issue.
I think what you’re describing is more like 3d rendering.
IMO using AI is more like directing in a film. You’re not the one creating the art, and the level of control you have is restricted to providing guidance and retrying.
So would you say film direction is not an art form?
I’d say it’s a grey area, like AI prompting
You’re not the one implementing the final result, you’re just providing guidance to other(s) who produce the final piece of art.If there is artistry in that, it seems like it’d apply equally to directing as it does to prompt engineering.
You can recognize the style of good film directors. I think it is certainly an art.
I don’t necessarily disagree.
The style of a director is the common set of guidance that they provide to the artists who do the work of making the film (eg the actors, the grips, the editors, the lighting, the markup, etc).
Likewise someone who uses AI to make art can have common things they seek in all the AI images they generate. Common things they include in their prompts to push the images to appear in a particular way.They’re not the same but there is enough commonality that criticism of one mostly applies to the other.
Therefore, AI art is art. Whether it is ethical is another story.
AI art can be art, anything can be art. But I would say I don’t consider most AI images to be art.
But the ethics of AI is a far more important discussion.
Agreed, the process is very non-artistic. There are too many layers that remove the creator from the process of creating. It’s more of a science than an art, and unsurprisingly an artistic spirit is usually lacking from it.
The results are better when in the hands of artists, but many artists don’t enjoy using the tools because they are so removed from an artistic work flow and are such a black box most of the time. It’s not artistically fulfilling to press a button and see what comes out.
Just my 2 cents as an artist who has experimented with the tools quite a bit and still doesn’t love them.
I like this take.
How far can the artist be removed from the art, and still be considered the artist?
And is it even important to ask “is this art” if art is inherently subjective? It’s probably more important to ask “who is this helping?”I have a pretty wide definition of art, so I hesitate to say it can’t be art flippantly. I do think that for something to be art it must contain the voice of the artist, though, and for many AI generations I don’t think you can see that voice, even if a lot of work went into creating it. Maybe that will change as the tools become more sophisticated and easier to get what you want out of them.
I agree but I don’t think that has to do with AI necessarily. There are people who create images without soul, no matter the medium and tools used.
I think that people who make soulless art are just drawn to AI generators because it allows them to make something aesthetically passable without hours and years of tedious practice (which they otherwise wouldn’t be willing to do since they obviously have no care for the art).
But at the end of the day, the only action they’re taking to capture the art is they press a button.
Wut? Are you serious? You’re just going to boil down an entire artform to that? That’s an unbelievably reductive opinion.
Anyone can take a photo, sure but making art via photography is incredibly complex. I’m not a photographer at all and even I can understand that. It’s the photographer’s tastes and years of learning and practice that ultimately creates an impactful photo. You must think playing drums is just hitting tubes with plastic lids with sticks then, right?
I struggle to believe that you have put any thought into this opinion of yours.
Anyone can take a photo, sure but making art via photography is incredibly complex.
I think that’s exactly the point. Anyone can use AI, but that doesn’t make then all artists. But there is a place for AI in art, like many other tools. Same as for other tools, jusy knowing how to use them doesn’t make you an artist. Just look at all the bad Photoshop stuff everywhere. Does that mean that using Photoshop makes you a talentless hack? Or just that a lot of hacks use it to pretend they’re artists? Same for AI.
Wut? Are you serious? You’re just going to boil down an entire artform to that? That’s an unbelievably reductive opinion.
This statement can also accurately describe those who say ai art isn’t art.
Wut? Are you serious? You’re just going to boil down an entire artform to that? That’s an unbelievably reductive opinion.
That’s kind of the point, isn’t it? People might spend a lot of time learning the different AI tools, how to supplement them with post processing and manual edits, how to combine them and how to nudge them in the direction they want, and then spend countless evenings trying to get the result they want. And people are going to say “they just AI generated it, they are not artists”, just like people might say photographers are not artists, they just take a photo.
But we know it’s far from “just” taking a photo or “just” generating it with AI. Sure, you can “just” do both, but the result will be far from real art without all the preparation and extra work.
But it’s easy to take a random shitty AI image to laught at, just like it’s easy to take a random shitty photo.
First you confirm they have to spend a lot of time to set everything up, then you claim it’s just pressing a button? 🤨
Taking a picture with your phone maybe looks like that, when you don’t care, but knowing one’s gear and using it properly is already many levels above just pressing a button. Then only a few questions and one presses the button. Questions like: what will be blurred? what will stand out? how the picture will be composed? will colours play? or textures? are there relations between objects in the picture?
What in trying to say is: I don’t agree with you, that it’s just pressing a button. Programming is also just pressing buttons, right? 😉
I think the person you’re replying to is trying to say that:
It’s NOT just pressing a button for the people making it
But to the outsider that look at it thinks it’s just pressing a button because they only see the final ending.
Photography is capturing something real in the physical world. Even if the action can be boiled down to “push a button” the photographer needs to have at least some presence where the real event is taking place.
AI art is not a depiction of a real event and requires no physical presence. It’s also not being brought to life by the person taking credit for it. That’s not to say AI generated images can’t be cool or useful but I don’t think they are art. If your definition of art is loose enough to apply to AI generated images then the I think the artist credit should belong to the AI itself or the team that wrote the software, not the person typing in prompts.
I think, where the real conflict comes from, is that most traditional artists are passionate about their craft and need to be able to sell their commodity art. Most people are empathetic of that and therefore not a fan of other commodity art competing with these passionate artists.
Photography was also controversial when it first appeared, because it meant traditional artists could hardly sell portraits and realistic paintings anymore.
I think, it also took a while for people to learn of and believe that some people are actually genuinely passionate about photography, too.And well, AI is now the new thing, but it’s also kind of worse. Because it’s not just certain kinds of paintings that are affected, they’ve literally been trained to replace all commodity art.
And they’re stealing off of those traditional artists (someone snapping a photograph of the Mona Lisa and trying to sell it as art will also get heckled).
And it’s going to be hard to convince people that typing words into a box is something to be passionate about.It’s a tool in a box. Maybe an artist can use it get some inspiration and not actually use any of the generated images. Or generate a backdrop for their portrait drawing. Or generate a composition they like and then draw over it.
AI “art” is theft. Doesn’t matter how much time they spend setting up the perfect prompt. It’s not their viewpoint. It’s not their aesthetic or style. They made no decision to go one direction or another. It’s an aggregate of someone ( or many someones) else’s work.
Ok it isn’t that easy to get the ai do what you want. So being good at writing prompts is indeed a skill. But it is not an art skill. I mean I can get a similar result by just bullshiting words at the ai. If I draw sth. By myself it’s is shitty and takes days. So well I appreciate the tool but I wouldn’t call anyone an artist who uses ai without any corrections. If you edit it so it looks better maybe you are an artist. Idk
Of all the unsettling nonsense here, those teeth are just horrifying. Although the toe-fingers are a close second.
It’s because you don’t understand their vision – classic idea guy redux
I kinda feel the same at times with 3d printing. I can make you rare parts or plastic piece for an appliance from scratch with my hands. I can make you a cosplay suit of armor from scratch out of foam and it’ll end up looking like iron man armour. Then a guy does the same thing in a printer and goes to me “I made this on my own” and I stare at him.
I kinda get you, but ultimately the design of the printed materials had to be created by someone. Creation is the key in all of this.
In this comparison, ideally that creator is the person printing the materials. There’s a disconnect if someone just downloaded the CAD files and printed it up then claimed 100% ownership of the creation credit.
I don’t see anything wrong with someone designing all the pieces in CAD, which is an artform in itself IMO, printing them and proudly wearing them. Its just a different tool. You use hand tools, they used digital tools.
there’s also operating the machine. for some prints I’d argue actually getting the printer to print it is a bigger achievement than creating the design itself.
Almost as bad as a banana taped to the wall.
This is a pretty complex topic, as a quick knee jerk I agree AI art isn’t art in the common sense, but one thing I disagree with is that all art has intent or even needs it.
I don’t think AI art is going to or even tries to replace art as a creative pursuit. If anything it’s more likely to replace certain photography related jobs.
Currently the main use cases are
- Generating stock photos
- Generating texture maps
- Generating concept art
None of these things really care about intent, you could argue concept art does, but a lot of the time it’s just there to set a vibe/direction/theme. All of the above will still replace jobs but not the typical everyday artists jobs, maybe stock or texture photographers though.
Art isn’t art if it isn’t made by a living being, period.
