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AI art (and AI in general). The amount of misinformed and outright wrong bullshit that gets levelled at me when I defend AI or point out something false is ludicrous. Almost every single argument against it was levelled at photography a century ago, much of that was levelled at pre-mixed paints before that, and what's left is either flat out wrong, or levelled at the wrong place
Wait but why would someone defend ai art...
Like the only reason I can think of is it maybe makes someone who is lazy feel good about themselves because they make a computer generated picture with zero effort (while stealing from real artists and feeding the megacorp machine) ?
Sorry, this is on the same level of saying "well they denied electricity at first and this is just like that!" Braindead take.
Carry on. (Yes im reinforcing your comment by even replying here, ha!!)
AI art requires "zero effort" in much the same way that creating art using digital cameras requires "zero effort."
i’m an ML/AI engineer, i could generate plenty of things locally or at the university on their systems without a megacorp involved anywhere in the pipeline at this stage.
people would defend AI art bc they’re not conceited and do not hold weird selective views regarding what art is. that’s really all it is.
people can hate the technology all they want but that doesn’t change the fact that what they’re actually mad at is the result of solely corporatism and capitalism. the actual technology itself is a fucking fascinating take on statistics and how to handle big data. what, megacorps abused math so now i’m supposed to hate math? i’ll never understand you guys!
Lookout guys, its a prompt "engineer"!
My 5 year old niece is a prompt "engineer" too.
If you want art to have absolutely zero humanity in it, gobble up all the slop you want.
You are correct about the end stage capitalism component. But if youre truly a "prompt engineer" you should know running a local model doesnt at all unlink you from massive data sucking corps, because who do you think trained that model?
For the record I will also say that painting a picture DOES take more invested skill than a photograph, and I will respect the person who painted a scene vs took a picture of it WAY more. Now, both can be enjoyed by anyone, and thats fine.
I'll have absolutely 0 respect for any image made using ai. Its a toy, and a tool for corporations to further cut costs where they want to the most (take out the pesky humans and gross empathy, ick!)
It takes skill to eat literal shit without gagging
Doesn't change anything about how good it is.
Skill has nothing to do with art.
People said the same about electronic music. Calling it "skill-less" music, since you only have to "press a couple of buttons" instead of learning an entire instrument.
The skill that it takes to produce something is a horrible, horrible metric for what makes something good art or not. There are artworks that took tons of skill but are boring, bland, generic, emotionless - all the things you don't like about AI art. There are artworks that took next to no skill but stand out as powerful, great works that resonate with everyone.
Skill is a proxy used to judge art in place of having developed taste. The purpose of art is not to show off, to flex your skill, or demonstrate technical superiority to others. This is a very sad, utilitarian, economic view of art that I beg you to reconsider.
Its a good point. However id argue that many things did require great skill and time commitments OR the people who created them were so above normal people with their gifts that it didn't take them as much effort as someone else.
Example, do you think Bach wrote all his best work in a day with no effort ?
Do you think a 3 minute song made of GarageBand loops by a 13 year old is on the same level of art ? No, its not. However, someone may enjoy the 3 minute looped song over a Bach piece. Thats fine. But if we have to ask which is higher art and which is timeless, its going to be the Bach piece.
I agree though to a point, metal for example. Just because dream theater puts out an insanely complex 20 minute song that only they can play proficiently doesn't mean its "better" than enter sandman. The areas get very gray at that point.
While I agree with your conclusion about the garageband loops vs the Bach, I think that the skill was coincidental, not essential, in the superiority of the Bach piece. It's not the fact that Bach was more skilled that makes his piece better. It's simply the case that his skill made it easier for him to discover a better piece. It's something useful for him, but as people who experience his art, it's not what the art is about. If a toddler happened to accidentally mash out the same piece on the piano at home (yes this is unfathomably unlikely), it would still be an equally amazing and timeless piece - despite the fact that no skill whatsoever went into it. All that the artwork is, is contained in the artwork. Everything else is extraneous context that we may derive some other additional value from, but it is not essential to the art in itself.
i honestly stopped reading after you called my job prompt engineering.
machine learning has been a specialization for well over a century. i have a master’s degree in it, im an expert on the topic and am certain what i do is not “prompt engineering.”
do you think LLMs like ChatGPT just sprung out of the ground like plants? people had to design those. even if you don’t like them figuring out how to build one is engineering, doubtlessly so. using a tool that has been engineered isn’t engineering, obviously, but i’m not going to further entertain this strawmanning.
Yes GD and ML are entirely different. I agree with you. I just dont understand why you would support llm based art.
That's because you are as wilfully ignorant as trump cultist and refuse to understand how this new tool works. You've been told it's bad by luddite youtube influencers and that's good enough for you.
Here's my reason for it. Let's suppose that I have set a xylophone up outside near a rocky cliff face, and one day, some rocks fall loose from the top of the cliff and strike the xylophone in such a way as to coincidentally produce the melody of Bach's Prelude in C Major from the Well-Tempered Clavier. Is this melody any less beautiful, less artistic, because it was not produced by a human? Does it really matter whether the xylophone event happened before or after Bach's writing of the Prelude? If the xylophone event happened first, would we say Bach's authoring of the melody was superfluous?
Consider this: there are 8 notes to a major scale, and so this means that there are only 32,768 possible 5-note sequences within one octave to make a melody out of (more if you count the timing of the notes, but the point remains). The possibility space of melodies is already implicitly formed by the medium. When Bach writes a 5 note melody, we say that he has created a melody - but we could just as well say that he discovered one of the pre-existing 32,768 melodies of 5 notes.
This paradigm is true in visual arts as well. We can start with a small example: imagine a community of pixel artists making black and white pixel art images on a canvas of 32x32 pixels. Or you could imagine them as weavers of rugs with up to 32 weaves in and out in both directions, if you'd rather a low-tech example. There are a HUGE number of possible ways to choose to color in these pixels even just black and white. But the number is still finite. Now let me ask you this. Have you ever made visual art before? If you have, you probably know how the blank canvas full of possibilities quickly narrows down to constraints as your composition comes along. "If my figure is posed like this, I can't show both the elbow and wrist, unless I use a strange perspective...", "if I give them black hair, it darkens the composition too much and doesn't look as good, but maybe if I add more light it could work..." Etc. What is it that you're doing as an artist? You're narrowing down the possibilities, from the HUGE possibility space of the blank canvas, to narrower and narrower "acceptable" configurations according to the criteria of the goal you have in mind.
Now suppose instead that I was doing really constrained pixel art - black or white only on a 3x3 grid. In that case there are only 512 possible artworks to be made. In that case, we COULD lay out all 512 of them, and just pick the one we like best. But if we were not very smart people, maybe we couldn't figure out this trick, and we'd have to use our artistry to explore the 512 possible canvases one by one. We can imagine an artist eventually choosing configuration #371 as their artwork. They probably won't think of as though they've chosen configuration #371, they probably will think of it like "I have come up with this new arrangement of pixels on the 3x3 canvas" - but in reality all they did was discover a possibility that has already existed since the beginning of time. Either way, I hope you and I agree that this person's pixel art, despite being small and likely pretty boring, is still ART. It's a work of art, although maybe not a great one. Now if I have a computer do the same process - explore this latent possibility space according to some criteria, finally selecting one possible configuration - and let's say the computer also selects #371. Are we going to say this is not art? But this would be paradoxical! It's the same image the artist made! Anyone who is familiar with the notion of "the death of the author" will see this is quite the same sort of principle. And if the computer happened to select #371 before any human did, would we then accuse the human of having "copied" the computer? Clearly not. This line of thinking, to me, is a strong one to defend AI images as possibly being legitimate and original art.
As an artist, you cannot create a new possibility within the medium. You can only actualize a possibility that has always latently been implied by the constraints of that medium. This is why many musicians and artists often talk about "finding" a melody or "finding" a vision. They find it because they are searching. They are searching their own unique path through that massive possibility space. The possibility space is too large for us to just simply look at every possibility and pick the one we like best - so we have to explore it, choosing at every moment which direction is best to step towards next, based on what we've got so far, and what we think we've learned about the shape of this possibility landscape over our experiences as artists.
For the same reason that we defended computer-aided art back in the day after people had the exact same reaction to it.
And photography before that, and pre-mixed paints before that (the media dragged J. M. W Turner of all people for it!). I imagine many of the same arguments were used against pencils and brushes when they were first invented too!
Forgive the Haters
Yeah that's a damn fine example of a really stupid take. Thank you.
Lets start with the amount of effort it takes not being related to artistic value, otherwise your pictures would be worth more than Picasso's doodles, wh9ich is clearly bullshit. Plus the fact that's ableist as fuck - I recently suffered nerve damage and so can't actually control a pencil properly, and trying get painful, soi are you really saying disabled people can't and shouldn't create art?
Now theft - it; not theft. No artist is denied their work, no copies are made, and it can't reproduce their work. It can mimic a style but most of the people who complain about that are the most derivative anime-style furry porn artists (no offence to furry porn, but what they create is no high art!)
Oh, and I agree that the best ai, like most software, is run locally and is open source. Disliking megacorps is not a criticism of ai
So yeah, thanks again for illustrating my point
Lol at a luddite calling someone braindead.
Agreed. Obviously mega corporations suck, but AI as a technology does not NEED to be unethical. It sucks that because people want to hate on mega corps (rightfully so) they feel justified in tacking on any flawed argument they want to against AI.
People have issues separating out complex bundles of issues into their separate threads and dealing with them individually. It's much easier to keep it all jumbled together and pass judgement on the whole lot. It's lazy thinking, which is ironically contrary to the virtues so frequently espoused in these arguments.
Furthermore, like you said, many people have strong opinions on the issue despite not really having any understanding of the philosophy of art, history of art, or the technology itself. It boils down to the same sort of layperson's gibberish that gives us other bad takes like "abstract art isn't art, my dog could paint that!" or "this performance art is just a tax evasion scheme!". It reveals the tastelessness of the accuser. It's extremely frustrating that these people always present themselves as true art enjoyers, when in fact they are not.
It reminds me of a time I was at the symphony, and the opening piece was a very avant garde one. It displayed wonderful chromaticism, really emotional chaotic passages, clever balancing of orchestral timbres...I study and compose classical music, I know music theory quite deeply, and for me it was a lovely piece. When it was over, this old lady next to me, all dressed up, complained that "that was just noise, not even music", and got all indignant about the bastardization of art. I'm sure she would have said the same thing at the debut of Rite of Spring, which she now undoubtedly "admires" and upholds as a masterwork. I would be surprised if she could name the notes of the key of C major. Yet it is precisely her lack of knowledge which gives her such a narrow view of the art she imagines herself to be a connoisseur of.
Same exact phenomenon as I've complained about before on Reddit, with its endless art-boner for any realistic "impressive" pencil sketch, over something that is equally technically impressive and more emotional, but in a way they are too unknowledgeable to appreciate.
It's just the way of art, I suppose.
Yeah, spot on. Also The Rite Of Spring is one of my favourite pieces of music ever
you’re gonna get endlessly downvoted here on lemmy for this but if it makes you feel any better i work in ML/AI and feel the same way as you and the other guy here comparing it to computerized art.
people are really anthropocentric, short-sighted, and reactionary.
i’m not convinced by weird capitalist myths of “originality” or “the human touch” or whatever weird fetishizing they wanna do…
all art is predicated on that which came before, human or not. AI art is no different. artists shouldn’t be subject to the economy in such a way that something like generative art inspires such societal rage… in china genAI is popular with the youth and generally bc artists and artisans in china aren’t exploited the way they are in the west and are free to view genAI as a tool rather than a threat. why western commission artists direct their anger and rage at the machines putting their oppression on full display and not towards their oppressors and handlers themselves fucking confounds me. maybe people really are just, on average, kind of dumb. i keep looking for alternatives but nothing ever shows itself.
The fact you think all art is predicated on what came before is absolutely stupid.
If thats true, there would never have been anything new created. Ai slop generators CANT make anything new because they are limited on their (massively) illegally scraped input.
Also thinking that originality and human experience are capitalist myths is quite humorous, that is a new take.
it can be true and new things can be created, and if you understood how large systems of data worked you would clearly understand how these aren’t mutually exclusive. creativity is different from originality. one is real, the other doesn’t actually exist.
please, name even a single piece of media that is wholly original from all of human history. i’ll wait. there isn’t one. everything takes pieces of everything else.
Uh... all art is influenced by what came before. All of it, except maybe the very first cave paintings. And claiming that ai can't make anything new is as as clear an indicator that you don't know what you're talking about as is calling it "slop"
People are kinda dumb, but the level of wilful ignorance displayed by the anti-ai crowd is equalled only by trump cultists