Maybe I dislike AI art because it invariably ends up in this uncanny valley territory where on first glance it looks like “real” art but the longer you look at it the more you realize something is off about it.
TBF there is a certain half-truth here in that the fundamental underlying problem is the inherent contradictions in capitalism and not AI/machine learning spitting out art or writing based on a database of art/writing. However, we do live under capitalism, and thus appeals to novelty don’t automatically nullify the impact to creative workers.
idk I think oop has a point, lots of people on here seem to have reactionary protestant brained hangups about what is and isn't real art. It goes back to the like, max nordau with his entartete kunst (remember what happened to him). makes me deeply skeptical of anyone criticizing art as being lesser and harmful because of its form or presentation. And I thought 100 years ago we mostly settled this debate on the side of weird avant garde/experimental art.
I mean, with weird avant garde/experimental art you have a person making decisions about what they're making, how they're doing it, where they're displaying it, etc. There's intentionality to it - the artist has to visualize what they're going to do before they do it, and in that process the differences between one experimental artist who paints their canvasses all a single color and a different person doing something similar become alighted.
With generated images, however, the entire decision-making process has been offloaded to a machine, which by definition does not understand what it's doing or why, cannot have intentionality, and can only give a weighted average of the decisions that other artists have made in the past. From the "artist"'s point of view, you have an idea of what you want to see and you put in keywords related to it, and then you cycle through generated images until you get to one that's "close enough". Your input on the production of the image itself is completely alienated from it - you're like a producer telling someone what to paint, and then telling them to try again if you don't like it.
I mean, we have avant garde art where the author only transforms the raw materials very lightly, the most famous and controversial example perhaps being a certain porcelain fountain.
Also for AI specifically, depending on the model the artist has a pretty significant degree of control over various parameters of the generation, e.g. by 'fine tuning' and grafting your own data on top of the existing weights. It's certainly not just typing in different words. In the end I don't really see how it's fundamentally different from an artist applying various algorithmic filters and other transforms in Photoshop or whatever.
Yes but that's a decision, they were presented with the entire toilet and made a conscious decision to keep it. Choosing to use the instant art button isn't a "decision", because you have no information about what you'll get from it unless you yourself are the algorithm
People don't actually consider it that deeply. Dadaism has a cultural backdrop of artistic conflict that the creator thinks about when making it. When they make these art pieces and installations, they do so purposely knowing it's base nature, and riff off of it. This would be fine if AI artists actually did this... but no. They think they're actually Picasso. If there's any artistic value to it, it's own statement reflects negatively on itself.
Edit: This is because the toilet, which is a physically manifested object in reality, the AI generated pieces are effectively manifestations of societal attitudes, so using it without any modification or thought is just reproducing those attitudes.
Just remembered, this Tumblr has good takes on ai art and argues them better than I do. https://www.tumblr.com/txttletale/737649090420195328/hey-im-not-here-to-say-ai-art-isnt-art-the
This completely ignores my main point, though. I don’t care how much effort someone put into something, the problem is that manual art is a depiction of how the artist personally experiences the things they’re portraying, AKA societal attitudes filtered through their own experiences, while AI art is the unmitigated portrayal of what they tell it to state. Both take effort from both machine (tool) and computer, but only AI art reproduces societal attitudes without reflection
Maybe I dislike AI art because it invariably ends up in this uncanny valley territory where on first glance it looks like “real” art but the longer you look at it the more you realize something is off about it.
TBF there is a certain half-truth here in that the fundamental underlying problem is the inherent contradictions in capitalism and not AI/machine learning spitting out art or writing based on a database of art/writing. However, we do live under capitalism, and thus appeals to novelty don’t automatically nullify the impact to creative workers.
idk I think oop has a point, lots of people on here seem to have reactionary protestant brained hangups about what is and isn't real art. It goes back to the like, max nordau with his entartete kunst (remember what happened to him). makes me deeply skeptical of anyone criticizing art as being lesser and harmful because of its form or presentation. And I thought 100 years ago we mostly settled this debate on the side of weird avant garde/experimental art.
I mean, with weird avant garde/experimental art you have a person making decisions about what they're making, how they're doing it, where they're displaying it, etc. There's intentionality to it - the artist has to visualize what they're going to do before they do it, and in that process the differences between one experimental artist who paints their canvasses all a single color and a different person doing something similar become alighted.
With generated images, however, the entire decision-making process has been offloaded to a machine, which by definition does not understand what it's doing or why, cannot have intentionality, and can only give a weighted average of the decisions that other artists have made in the past. From the "artist"'s point of view, you have an idea of what you want to see and you put in keywords related to it, and then you cycle through generated images until you get to one that's "close enough". Your input on the production of the image itself is completely alienated from it - you're like a producer telling someone what to paint, and then telling them to try again if you don't like it.
I mean, we have avant garde art where the author only transforms the raw materials very lightly, the most famous and controversial example perhaps being a certain porcelain fountain.
Also for AI specifically, depending on the model the artist has a pretty significant degree of control over various parameters of the generation, e.g. by 'fine tuning' and grafting your own data on top of the existing weights. It's certainly not just typing in different words. In the end I don't really see how it's fundamentally different from an artist applying various algorithmic filters and other transforms in Photoshop or whatever.
Yes but that's a decision, they were presented with the entire toilet and made a conscious decision to keep it. Choosing to use the instant art button isn't a "decision", because you have no information about what you'll get from it unless you yourself are the algorithm
How is it different? The artist is presented with a generated image and can choose to keep it and publish or discard it.
People don't actually consider it that deeply. Dadaism has a cultural backdrop of artistic conflict that the creator thinks about when making it. When they make these art pieces and installations, they do so purposely knowing it's base nature, and riff off of it. This would be fine if AI artists actually did this... but no. They think they're actually Picasso. If there's any artistic value to it, it's own statement reflects negatively on itself.
Edit: This is because the toilet, which is a physically manifested object in reality, the AI generated pieces are effectively manifestations of societal attitudes, so using it without any modification or thought is just reproducing those attitudes.
Just remembered, this Tumblr has good takes on ai art and argues them better than I do. https://www.tumblr.com/txttletale/737649090420195328/hey-im-not-here-to-say-ai-art-isnt-art-the
She has other good posts about it (tagged ai-art)
This completely ignores my main point, though. I don’t care how much effort someone put into something, the problem is that manual art is a depiction of how the artist personally experiences the things they’re portraying, AKA societal attitudes filtered through their own experiences, while AI art is the unmitigated portrayal of what they tell it to state. Both take effort from both machine (tool) and computer, but only AI art reproduces societal attitudes without reflection
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