this post was submitted on 08 Aug 2024
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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
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:
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.
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.
"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.
"Modern art" also includes works like Black Swan 1 by WLOP and FUN by Mika Pikazo.
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:
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.