Because there are only a handful of communities that have enough traffic to sustain a meaningful conversation.
Even popular activities have low traffic, god forbid you want to participate in a community based around a niche activity.
I love Lemmy and I'm not going back to reddit... But sometimes it feels like a desolate wasteland here.
I mean, I was reductive wrt what a director does in the same way that you're reductive about what crafting a prompt involves. Do I think they involve the same level of effort? Absolutely not, directing is at a way larger scope and scale. But it's a matter of degree rather than kind. They're involved with the creative process at a remove, by providing instruction to others so that they may change the end result to fit what the director (prompter) envisions.
I think we have a powerful new tool, and in the hands of artists it will make art, and in the hands of the laypeople it will make soulless images devoid of meaning. The power of this tool has simply attracted a lot of laypeople because it gives them access to something they never had before, and as a result we get a flood of non-art.
But I think we agree wrt the ethics, which is by far the more important discussion.
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.
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?
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).
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.
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 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'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.
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?"
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"
Especially when it's always the same few people commenting and posting