I truly, deeply despise AI Art
I think what truly offends me the most about AI Art is how it takes something that is supposed to be incredibly meritocratic and turns it, essentially, into fast food consumerist garbage. It is the reduction of one of the truly special and awe-inspiring aspects of humanity into what is essentially pure trash.
What is the point of AI Art? What problem does it solve? So far, the only thing it appears to do is let grifters on Instagram trick people into believing they are incredible artists (while using actual artists when prompting the AI for images), and eventually directly threaten the livelihoods of artists and destroy the very idea of art as a career. No, prole, you do not get to enjoy making a living in Capitalism, now writhe like a worm under the boot of big tech.
All that for... what, making a fun toy for people to play with?
Let me be perfectly clear: AI Art is an affront to humanity. I am not saying this just as an artist who wanted to make a living off of his work - I've already accepted that careers and jobs aren't static.
No, there's something much more destructive going on here, something that makes me deeply uncomfortable about it. I genuinely believe we're on the verge of permanently losing a fundamental part of what it means to be human, here. Consider just for a second all of the infinite complexities that go into a piece of art, like how the artist has studied, their upbringing, their own personal experiences and circumstances that caused them to develop their skills in a particular way. All these things combined are result into a truly unique expression of individuality that still allows us to connect to others through it. In a way, you are sharing a truly intimate act when you show someone your art.
It's beautiful, isn't it? Too bad, because all that complexity and individuality is now going to be bulldozed and replaced by a significantly simpler dozen or so words you can type in a text box.
Consider the implications for a moment. There will come a point when you see an incredible digital painting that would've taken an artist an entire lifetime of drawing to achieve, and you simply won't give a shit. And I don't mean in the usual way that you look at an amazing piece of art and then move on with your life - no. You're not going to give a shit because you won't even consider if it was made by a human.
People will stop thinking incredible art can be attributed to humans as a default. Why would you? After all, we are going to be flooded with an endless torrent of images that are completely meaningless to everyone except the prompter himself. Sharing your "art" will become the equivalent of talking about your dreams with others.
All of this without mentioning the fact that painting as a career is destined to, for the first time in history, be well and truly eliminated. AI tech didn't come for the menial labor first as we predicted, nor the blue collar jobs that were meant to come after that. No, it went straight for the jugular of creatives. Soon, millions of artists will find themselves unemployable as their skills will become, if not utterly useless, rarely sought after. Why would a large entertainment company pay a real human being when MidJourney can create professional-grade concept art or illustrations in 5 seconds?
It's legitimately one of the most disturbing inventions that has ever been created. My doomerism towards humanity always had a sense of irony to it, but AI Art has removed that entirely.
Frank Herbert was fucking right, we need a Butlerian Jihad and we need it now.
I put the prompt "shih tzu toy poodle mix in knight armor, fantasy, realistic, detailed" in my computer. I check it later that day and there's a bunch of cute pictures there as well as a few eldritch horrors where the AI melds a helmet with a dog's head or something. I show my mom the best of the batch and she oohs and ahhs and points out the ones that look like our dog and tries to show them to him although I doubt he can really understand what the heck we're doing. It's fun.
I’m not saying it’s not fun, I’m saying it’s the destruction of the fundamental pillar of ‘what is art?’
People have said the same thing about the camera, computer, etc, but the fundamental difference is that those are tools that are wielded by a creative human mind. AI generated art is wielded by derivative processes that is absent of creativity.
and?
You asked where the joy is,I told you where the joy is. Maybe it's not John Singer Sargent or whoever type sublime artistic joy, but it's fun. I always thought about art as "something someone makes that provokes a feeling", and it certainly works under that definition. I doubt that's a very complex way of looking at it, but then again you will never get a concrete answer to "What is art?"
Also kinda pedantic but there is some kind of creativity being employed w/ AI art. At bare minimum, you have to come up with an idea to feed it. Is typing in "epic fantasy battle trending on artstation" particularly creative? No, but neither is drawing the most simplistic stick figure with a line for them to stand on, and technically that's an artistic creation, too.
A simplistic stick figure with a line for them to stand on is inherently creative, whereas nothing an AI generates is. The former is literally employing techniques and processes to bring create something from the human mind, regardless of quality. The latter is devoid of that.
My initial comment literally answered this. Art is a re-presentation of the human experience.
The AI generates nothing without human input. Therefore isn't the user in that case employing a technique and/or process through their inputs, regardless of the medium that input is channeled through?
Your initial comment has a singular definition of art, but unless someone finally figured it all out recently and I've been living under a rock there is no one unifying definition of art that can be used to unambiguously rule what is and is not art. Google "what is art" and you'll find pages of people trying to figure that out and providing varying definitions that can contradict each other. People have been arguing about this forever. There is no definitive art-o-meter that buzzes when you get within five miles of the Louvre.
Sounds like you’ve been living under a 70 year old rock
:shrug-outta-hecks:
Eh, there's definitely a right and wrong way of coming up with prompts for the AI to use. It's not like we can just say, "make art that doesn't suck lmao" to the AI and the AI would come up with a completely novel work of art that doesn't suck. As of right now, it still needs human input to guide it. And as long as you still have to game the prompt in order to guide the AI to do what you want it to do, there'll still be artistry within the whole process.
You’re missing the point. You can input text into an ai to spit out art, but what it spits out is inherently devoid of a creative vision. It is choosing from derivative processes to match a text input.
A photographer wields a camera to create a photograph, but the photographer is ultimately the one who creates. A user inputs texts into an AI, but the user does not create and the AI inherently can not create.
How so? The first step that initiates the process is still a human. Going back to your photography example, the photographer has to press a button, which the camera then works its electromechanical magic while the AI artist types a bunch of text and presses enter, which the AI then works its algorithmic magic.
The amount of human labor time needed to produce an AI drawing isn't zero. It's an exceedingly trivial amount compared with actually painting a painting, but it's still not zero.
holy shit I put in almost the exact same prompt, minus the toy poodle part, for my little guy about a month ago
got some REALLY good wizard ones out of it
:comrade-doggo: I put on my robe and wizard hat