this post was submitted on 08 Aug 2024
320 points (82.1% liked)
Memes
45666 readers
1789 users here now
Rules:
- Be civil and nice.
- Try not to excessively repost, as a rule of thumb, wait at least 2 months to do it if you have to.
founded 5 years ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
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"