I agree.To me art is an expression of the soul; it's an expression of one's perception of the world. It has spiritual qualities (in an atheist sense). There is an inner world that puts out together a piece of art that LLMs do not possess and that's why they need to train on existing material that comes from human expression.
I highly doubt an LLM suffers, loves, hopes, hates and cries like us. Art is an expression of who we are individualy and collectively. LLMs only hallucinate with art made by humans. While we humans can find inspiration from other artists, it is not a necessity to train on vast databases of art pieces to put something together. They say that while it's hard to define what art is, you know it when you see it. To me when I get that feeling from something made by AI, all I really see is a piece of an other artist's soul trapped in some sort of simulacrum put together by an algorithm.
Cut the training material and AI "art" will stagnate. We, on the other hand, won't.
That's why I think AI art will never really be art... unless if one day they somehow develop a "soul" themselves and start to express an inner world of their own.
It reminds me to those hyper-realistic paintings that were trendy 15 years ago, they were impresive feats of skill but by the fifth in a row they became boring. AI is the same but without the skill.
AI generation is a gradient from clean up to controlling every pixel.
If an artist draws the line art, does basic coloring, but has a network do the sharing, that's art. How far does that carry?
Surely, anything that had heart and soul poured into it is art, right? Text prompt, or otherwise. You don't have to resonate with it. You can be scared of it.
But you said imagination, feeling, skill make up art. It is bold, or naive, to think those who create AI works doesn't have these traits, like to say the hobbies, programmers, and the curious, aren't artists.
I tend to agree with that. I also hate that of all the great uses for generative AI, this is the direction they took the tech. It's not a replacement for whole jobs, and I knew that at the onset, but so many dumb business types thought it could replace entire departments, customer service, etc.
to be honest, i'm not only referring to images. any kind of what so called "art" since it's possible now to make "music" with AI. thanks for the response anyway.
I don't think we're at the level AI prompting can be used to reflect the subtlety needed to make art. It's like chainsaw art, cool and mebbe art but it's not art like the old masters art.
Also everyone thinking that shitting out a Rembrandt liking image is fantastic does not understand what art really is.
The person inputting prompt modifications may have controlled the larger assets as a whole, but they did not curate the Gestalt of the image. If the input is text that a computer is to output as a literal estimation, then it is data, not art; if the input is data curated by a person who means for a computer to output it as plotted data, such as with a complex lineplot or 3D model or even text as ASCII images, then that can be art.
Yes even then. Writing a prompt is no more an artistic skill than describing your idea to an artist you're commissioning. You didn't create a damn thing. You will not be called an artist for commissioning a work.
If the person using the paintbrush is the artist - not the brush itself - then why doesn’t the same logic apply to AI? It’s just a tool, after all. AI doesn’t generate anything on its own. Sure, you could ask it to spit out a picture with no effort, but you can do the same with a camera. However, if you have a clear vision of how you want the final result to look, it’s a different story. Getting AI to output an image is easy. Getting it to output your image - that’s hard.
If you asked a human to draw an image of what you describe, it would be easier and you still would not be considered an artist. So why should a "prompt engineer" be considered an artist?
Well, firstly, “art” and “artist” are human-invented concepts - they don’t exist in the real world, only in our minds - so in the end, we’re essentially debating semantics. That said, if you hire an artist, then yes, they’re the artist, not you. But I don’t think that same logic applies to AI, because it’s not making any decisions on its own. It’s a tool, just like a paintbrush, camera, or drums.
If an elephant paints a picture, is that art? And is the elephant the artist? If a child bangs on drums and is just making noise, is that art? Are they the artist? If I grab a camera, point it somewhere, and press a button, is that art? Am I the artist? Personally, I’d say each of those is easier to do than writing a prompt that actually produces the image you had in mind, yet I doubt you'd come telling me that my photography isn't art only becuse I didn't put enough effort into it.
I’m not hugely experienced with AI image generators, but I have played around with one, trying to get it to create a specific kind of picture I had in mind - and I’ve ended up with something like 70 variations, none of which quite hit the mark. I’ve already spent over four hours on this project, and if I somehow manage to figure out the right prompt and finally get the image I’m after, then yes - I’d say that’s art and I'm the artist.
In general - yes. There is a flood of shitty and lazy “art” that has infected search results and creative spaces. I’m also deeply uncomfortable with it being trained on artists work without their consent - for all the talk about it being equivalent to human inspiration I’m pretty sure there have been examples where it’s started generating attempts at signatures.
It’s terrible in knitting and crochet spaces (I imagine woodworking and sculpture and architecture too) because there are lots of things generated which are physical impossible and just wrong to anyone who enjoys the crafts. It gives false understandings of what those art forms look like.
I think the entire point of art is the human intentionality aspect. Art is humans using materials to do things that don’t serve an immediate practical purpose. There has to be some element of “desire” on the part of the artist.
So it’s not that it is impossible to use AI tools to generate art (there’s stochastic computer generated pieces from the 70s that are lovely iirc) To me though, the way these tools are used is what is important - if you’re using an AI you’re training and adjusting yourself, if you’re spending hours tweaking prompts and perhaps sifting through hundreds of pictures to combine and really participate in “making” something.
The current trend is really just a bunch of content sludge. I don’t see the appeal in either the process of creation or in what can be appreciated from it. The best stuff is mostly memey topical political jokes, where it rests more on the symbols rather than the art itself.
Like, when I make art - my process is adding layers over weeks and weeks. It’s noticing that I don’t like the way this section looks, so I go back over it, come back to it later… it’s a process - I engage with and shape the work. I’m just a guy who glues trash to things and paints them, my art doesn’t really have external value - but it still feels like art in a way that getting Midjourney to make pictures of Gandolf with big honking naturals isn’t.
What I hate about AI art: How it's based on stolen work. How it is purpose built to replace real, talented artists and devalue their labor. How it uses way more energy than it needs to and is pretty wasteful
What I love about AI art: Instant stupid shit for meme madness.
If AI art was all just stupid jokey shit like this that a friend of mine made when we were discussing how people were making Ghibli-fied versions of important moments in history, and we decided to go with "George Bush doesn't care about black people" but make Mike Myers dressed as Austin Powers, I'd be okay with it entirely. It's not for profit by devaluing artists and using this work instead of a real artists work, it's just stupid shit that makes us laugh. Everything else aside, I can get behind stupid shit that makes us laugh. The rest of the issues with AI art suck though.
I'm not entirely against LLMs as a tool, but I especially despise the image-based LLMs. They are certainly neat for some fun things. I've used them a little bit here and there for a dumb profile picture or a "I'm kinda thinking about this..." Brainstorm, but even in those cases I noticed the capabilities of the LLM and its tendencies quite literally pidgeon hole my artistic vision and push me in other directions that felt less and less creative. (Sidenote: I feel the same way about coding LLM tools. The longer I use them at any given time, the less creative I feel and it has a noticeable impact on my interest in the code I'm writing. So I don't really use them much. Also I consistently manage to point out coding LLM code in PR reviews because it's always kinda funky)
I've avoided using AI art tools for a while now. I'll consider some limited use if the cost, billionaire ownership, blatant theft of real IP without compensation, and environmental impact problems are solved. (No, an "open source" model doesn't solve all of these problems, especially since nearly all open source models are not truly open source and are almost always benefiting from upstream theft)
You know what I do like about AI art? I like the older Google machine learning art experiments from the mid-2010s. They invoked a strange existential curiosity. But those weren't done with LLM's.
Outside of LLMs, I like that there are some newer tools for editing that can do a better "lasso" select, that can mix and match into brushes as an alternative to something more algorithmic, the audio plugin that uses a RNN to simplify or expand upon an audio technique. Things that are tools that can be chosen or avoided and have nothing to do with LLMs.
I honestly cannot wait for this bubble to burst and for these tools to return to a cost that they'd need to be for these companies to turn a profit. A higher cost would eliminate all this casual use that is making people worse at research, critical thinking, and creativity, as well as make the art tools less competitive to just paying artists, even for scumbags wanting to cut the artists out. And it'd incentivize non-LLM, non-insanely costly ML techniques again instead of the current "LLMs for everything" nonsense right now.
I'm not sure hate is the right word. When you've got someone stabbing you in the back multiple times, is it really hate you're feeling toward them? Or is it anger, fear, and danger?
I "hate" it in the sense that it's built on theft and requires the exploitation of underpaid workers to develop and maintain it. I "hate" it in the sense that we're living on a burning cinder with dwindling fresh water resources and "AI" is adding fuel to the fire. I "hate" it in the sense that it's being used to further undervalue artists and writers. I "hate" it in the sense that it fills our spaces with crap that so often looks like it was cribbed off of Rapunzel, Wreck-It-Ralph, and some other things.
I don't hate the "art." The AI can't do much about it.
What I strongly dislike is people who manage to draft literally 40 words or less and think they "created" something.
You didn't. You a mathematical model to do something for you. You therw 175 tokens into a whirlpool and got am 87% what you wanted image out. If you even had an idea of what you wanted before hand.
Yes, I hate it. I hate that it fills every image platform. It is not art at all.
It’s a fun toy thing and can make decent images but its not art and can never replace actual art. When you compare for example an anime art of someone who actually drew it and the AI image, the drawn art is 9 out of 10 times better.
It’s also petty pretty easy to spot whether an image is AI or drawn made.
It’s also petty pretty easy to spot whether an image is AI or drawn made.
Doubt. Most studies have shown that people are horrible at actually picking out AI art. You suffer from selection bias because you don't realise which ones you didn't spot.
its not art and can never replace actual art. When you compare for example an anime art of someone who actually drew it and the AI image, the drawn art is 9 out of 10 times better.
That implies it's solely about quality? At the inevitable point where AI gen gets better than drawn art, is the AI gen image now art too?
Firstly, it's not art. I already hate that OP called it that. It's AI generated imagery. There is no art involved outside of art theft.
Secondly, it's legal art theft created by those types of people that either never considered artists to have any value, or have a chip on their shoulder against artists.
Thirdly, at no point in history have artists ever been appreciated, despite art being the most important element of everything. Imagine right now what a user interface would look like without artistic design. Or a car. Or your toothbrush. AI gen shafts artists... again... with the absolutely ridiculously, flippant argument that it "democratises art", as if it's some sort of noble privilege rather than a skill literally anyone can practice.
it's arguably used most for generating text and images.
yeah i know, that's why you hating on me by me, saying it's "art" but supposed to be "AI generated imagery". we can make "music" from AI now. thanks for your response anyway!
I hate those who call themselves artists when they're just commissioning a computer to make a picture for them. I also hate it when those same people deny the unethical aspects of AI generation.
Edit: to add more, I also hate the AI images themselves. They are filling up the internet with slop. This is very annoying, and the same goes for LLMs. I don't want to get AI generated results when I didn't search for them specifically.
Pretty much sums up my thoughts as well. Don't try to pass it off as your creation. I have zero skill and like using it to make dumb stuff like a Xenomorph twerking for my most recent request. Had a speech to text typo that created what is possibly the best gibberish meme I've ever seen. But again, I am completely honest about it, as if it would've been hard to tell anyways.
Here's a screenshot of the typo prompt and result.
No, because I don't have an irrational fear of AI. I don't like when poor or unfitting AI art is used, but it isn't AI who makes that decision to use it.
As an artist who had her art stolen for usage in AI, I hate AI generated images for several reasons. I've personally had my art stolen to be used in a prompt without my permission, and said art got mangled so much that it looked terrible. AI image generators scrape the internet for art so they can amalgamate these pieces of art together to correspond to a prompt, and this art is taken without the permission of the artists. In some AI generated images, the mangled remnants of artists' signatures are still visible. Beyond art theft, it's instant gratification with zero effort. A huge part of why I appreciate art is because someone made it, someone spent potentially hours to create this beautiful picture! When I look at my old art, I can instantly get a feel for what vibes I had going through my mind at the time, like I could almost take a peek into my past self's brain, and this applies to other artist's work too!
Prompting an AI image generator, in my eyes, is like prompting an artist to draw something for you, except that artist turns out to be someone who traces bits of other people’s art without their permission, or copy and pastes it. Sometimes AI generated images aren't immediately recognizable, so me and a lot of other artists have tried to make it a trend to post progress pictures and other receipts along with our art.
Art is an attempt to communicate (usually to communicate something of the human condition). Current 'art' AI is too far away from intelligence to have anything to communicate. All it can do is mindlessly try to copy and blend what it's seen before without understanding it.
I'm an artist / writer and I don't see problem with generative AI when you're at a really early concept stage. Exploring ideas, try to get over creative blocks, that sort of stuff. Maybe the AI hallucinations and fuckups can give you ideas worth exploring.
But using them as a literal basis for artwork you work further on is a fool's errand. It's easier to maybe take ideas from there, but work from scratch anyway. And I do realise that even that is controversial.
Also, could be a legal quagmire. Also not happy about the copyright appropriation situation or the environmental impact.
Not a fan. It admittedly can be an amusing toy - type something in and wow look what it did! But the costs are high, and our society isn't a utopia where people don't need to labor for survival.
Maybe if we were post scarcity it wouldn't matter that much. But we're not, and this AI stuff is going to hurt labor, benefit the ownership class, and probably be mildly bad for end users too.
AI art is fine being used as a tool. What I have a problem with is it's users calling themselves "artists".
A person who types a prompt into an AI is no different than a person who hires a painter and describes what he wants them to paint.
Just because that "painter" in the first case happens to be a computer, that doesn't mean that by default the title of "artist" defaults back to the person who wrote the prompt. That person is still just someone telling someone (or something) what to draw.
In other words, you don't become the artist just because you eschew paying an actual artist and instead have your computer do it for you.
I see this view a lot and I agree with it, but how can you argue with anyone who says well, that's what they said about synthesizers for music. Or ipads for art. Or computers replacing typewriters. Are you saying anyone who doesn't hand write a book in cursive while solely learning the djembe from a scroll is not a real artist ? (Obvious /s but it's kind of valid). Unfortunately we are the old man yelling at cloud, just 20 years too early. The future will laugh that there were AI detractors (in my opinion).
Everything you've mentioned are tools for an artist to use to express THEIR talent. A typewriter doesn't come up with the words. a Synthesiser doesn't compose the the music that its playing. Comparinging AI (which requires zero talent) is disingenuous.
To put it another way, if you're a carpenter using hammers and saws (tools), and then some engineer creates a robot that can be programmed to do that job and allows them to fire all the carpenters. Does that make the programmers carpenters even though not a single one has used a circular saw.
The line between "tool" and "crutch" is drawn by how much talent and training it takes to use it.
AI is NOT used as a tool in that traditional sense, its a shortcut to fake talent in ways that hammers, paintbrushes, typewriters and even just good old fashioned traditional Photoshop aren't..
You have to have the training and talent to get use out of a real tool. And AI certainly potential for use in that regard; proofreading, background removal, grammar checking etc...
DJs use the tools to express THEIR talent. They don't just say "create a composition that sounds good". That's the difference between an artist and a fraud.
Yes. It's flooding places, and suddenly people decided that "smooth looking" was the absolute end goal of any drawing/music/creation/etc. It's not. Some of the most famous art piece are completely wrong, some aren't. That's not the endgoal. Nobody's gonna care that you can take that very simplified drawing and "generate" an extremely high-detail, fully shaded image that looks like it, as it was never the purpose.
Creative direction, intent, consistency (or absolute lack of consistency), execution, style, and a lot more goes into any creation, art or not. That's what make a piece feel interesting. There's a reason even now, with generated content being plausible as far as glaring mistakes go, we can still point out which image "feels" AI across a lot of different styles. At best, to remove that feeling of it being wrong, you'd have to spent a lot of time on the output of a model to touch it up everywhere and change details, which requires time and proficiency, which a lot of people jumping on that trend definitely lacks. Some of the worst results I've seen have been from people trying to make other "pay" for their output.
There's also the issue of how these works. For decades, creative people (among other) have been sued by big companies, some very harshly, to protect IP from such overexploitation as "using a three second excerpt in a video" or "using the vague likeness of a character". And now, these same targets are getting fleeced of their work by more big companies under the cheer of the people. That's a gut feeling of disgust right there. Combined with the utter lack of creativity in these, we're really watching the potential death of an activity (artistic creation), and that's not a good place to be. If one wants to argue that "generated art" is also a form of creation, keep in mind that these models can't be trained on generated pieces without extreme prejudice. Killing the very source they need to operate does not seem like a good long-term plan. But who cares about long-term when you can make a quick buck, right?
I'd also like to point out that all this rambling is about generated content that goes from "output of a model" to "final piece" with little to no afterthought. The "common" piece, where people will be happy to see twenty broken pieces because "well, there's a lot of them, so it's good". AI and LLM models, as a tool, may or may not be useful in the long term, but I can see smaller applications, even for art. A lot of menial tasks can be improved, general posing, references, simple background that are marginally considered part of the product, guides, etc. Taking something you've drawn/created, and locally use an AI "filter" to remove an extra line cleanly or touch up a mistake you want out? Great. The tool carries the intent of the artist, the same way a pen do.
But AI generated content? Make a prompt, a stick-figure sketch, and call it a day? These, IMO, will always look and taste like garbage, no matter how pretty they look. Because it was never "pretty" we were looking for.
As an artist I'm conflicted. I like new technology and methods and mediums, but it's entirely unethical to make models on unconsenting artists with no compensation or recognition.
Almost all of the images generated by AI models are just eye candy and not art. It can be eye candy based on a bunch of art, but it still isn’t artistic. It’s often just an image aimed at farming engagement. “Here’s a picture so that your algorithms don’t ignore my post. Do I have your attention now?”
I feel old because I remember when this conversation was happening with airbrushing photographs and then Photoshop.
And now these days, really good Photoshop is invisible. We can remove people from backgrounds. We can improve the lighting. Movie CGI is just photoshooting stills.
AI will reach that stage too, where it will be so good, it's scary that you can't tell.
I don't hate it, some of the images generated look awesome. But that's just an image that "literally anyone could do". It's the equivalent of instant lamen or cup noodles.
Afaik, it can't come up with new styles and most of the stuff pumped out just wholesale copies existing stuff: the majority either looks like a Disney 3d animation, or fancy anime-esque render. Some try to look like realistic oil paintings, those look cool and pretty, but nothing worth making a poster.
I think the only people, besides tech bros, who are happy with this are those that hate giving art any value.
Yes, as it conveys nothing more than the prompt it was given. Art is a means of communication, but when all it does is chop up pictures it’s seen to match a prompt there just isn’t anything to analyze.
It may look pretty in the moment, but lacks all substance and will be forgotten as quickly as it was generated.
Just playing devil's advocate here. Let me lay out some counter points .. (it'll take me an edit or two to format this right, btw.)
Instructing a machine to assemble bits in a specific way takes creativity. My prompt to AI is that creativity and without it, you can't even get much of a copy of anything. Even though AI is generally assembling stolen bits, the end result (ignoring copyright law) can be original.
Music has been mostly "figured out" and many songs we have heard over your lifetime use many of the same exact chord progressions. I-V-vi-IV being one of the most common and used in the following songs:
Journey -- "Don't Stop Believing"
James Blunt -- "You're Beautiful"
Black Eyed Peas -- "Where Is the Love"
Alphaville -- "Forever Young"
Jason Mraz -- "I'm Yours"
Train -- "Hey Soul Sister"
The Calling -- "Wherever You Will Go"
Elton John -- "Can You Feel The Love Tonight" (from The Lion King)
Musicians may use patterns or progressions from other songs. Painters may use the same colors and brushes designed by other artists. In both cases, techniques that have been known for thousands of years are being used in self-expression.
I assert that given the correct instructions, you can still give someone plenty to analyze, via prompt, that has enough detail to extract a deeper meaning:
FWIW, I am extremely fed up with this AI hype now. "AI" is just a tool, and that is it. I could go on for hours about this mess, but I am trying to make a valid point: Regardless of how you interpret copyright, art is just self-expression.
There are endless examples I could give about technique re-use when it comes to creating art with machines. From my perspective, a particular brush stroke might be the same as using a specific bit at a particular depth of cut on a CNC. The art theft for AI training is one aspect, for sure. The biggest issue I see is that many people don't understand how to create original art and the AI just spits out a copy of something it was trained on and something the user already saw.
Edit: After reading many of the other comments here, many people have a strange definition of "art". Yes, art can be about communication, it can be about sending a message, it can express a style of creativity or hundreds of other things.
Art is just.. art. It's something a person sketches, composes, speaks, signs or farts. You don't have to like it or agree with it. Hell, you don't even need to recognize something as art for it to be art. Art is just self-expression. It's a feeling that is converted into some kind of other medium that others might happen to see, feel or hear, smell, taste or a combination of all of those things.
As much as I hate to admit it, a banana taped to a wall is art. Someone eating said banana is also art. I think it's fucking stupid, but who am I to not call it someone's self-expression?
That some, most or all art is partly or wholly derivative of other art is not relevant because the process used by 'AI' does not resemble the artistic process. When Shakespeare wrote Hamlet (a work derived from an older play, itself derived from an older myth which itself had been through countless retellings, variations and translations), he did not do what an LLM does, which is approximately to say: 'It's statistically likely that the phrase "to be" will be followed by the phrase "or not to be"'. Putting together statistical likelihoods is not creativity. This alone shows that AI 'art' is not creative and therefore not art at all.
Additionally, instructing a machine to make things from prompts does not require creativity. Creativity is not 'having ideas'; it's an ongoing process. When you tell an image generator to make an image, you're not asking it to create something, because it cannot do it. You're saying 'Show me the statistically likely output for this input'. Again, this statistical generator is not the same as, nor is it comparable to, the human imaginative process.
I knew exactly what I wanted before I even typed in the prompt: My vision was for a nervous, burned-out lemming to be sitting on a log, hunched over a laptop smoking a cigarette with bloodshot eyes surrounded in crushed beer cans.
That is not creative? Saying I have no imagination or creativity is kinda rude and giving all my credit to AI is downright insulting. Sure, I didn't draw it and I absolutely do not have the ability to draw it. However, you cannot (reasonably) deny that the idea is mine. I'm not exactly the most creative person in the world, but damn.... (The image will show up under my username over at least two instances over the span of 1-2 years? It's mine, is my point.)
If you saw my edit, you should know exactly what I thought when you said "artistic process".
However, my underlying point about derivative process or technique was to shoot a hole in the arguments of "cobbled together bits from wherever" and why I specifically used music as an example. Drum lines are openly copied. Not derived: blatantly copied. It's considered a compliment in many cases, actually. Progressions and transitions are all just copies. You don't even need AI to "statistically generate" music patterns. With every chord I choose to start a progression, there are only X number of chords that will work correctly after it.
I believe there have been some projects to generate (within reason) every chord progression possible and every kind of melody that would fit it... statistically. Almost every bit of popular music you hear is a derivative or a copy or reused or whatever, is my point. How many times have you heard the "Amen break"? More times than you actually know, unless you know your music, then you do. Much of music is just, for lack of a better term, math.
Creativity is an idea or multiple ideas. It's anything that exceeds the sum of your existing knowledge. AI by itself isn't "creative" and it is impossible for AI to be creative, we both agree. Again, from my perspective, AI can be used as a tool to fill in the gaps between two different ideas. It's the assembly of different ideas or components that is important. The sum of the key bits.
In my CAD work, I use formulas and simulated physics to automatically generate connecting features or structures. Are the designs I create exempted from "art" because of that?
Putting creativity and art into a box and saying you must follow "creative process" or "artistic process" is just odd. You can think that way if you want, but it's very limiting. The artists I study make a habit of saying "fuck the rules, fuck the process and do what makes you feel good."
Just for lulz, I was wondering what another machine would think of my Lemming. It kinda got it, but kinda didn't. Statistically, it figured out the parts, but you should know darn well what my intent was:
Again, you've written quite a long comment, almost none of which is pertinent.
Music is not math. Some aspects of it can be expressed mathematically, yes, but that's not the same thing.
Imagining the idea 'I'd like to see an image of a lemming', which is what you've done, does require some imagination. However, the output is not art because the process used to go from your 'prompt' to the image was not a creative one. (Also, this isn't entirely pertinent, but the image output is really bad. If it had been made by a person and otherwise looked like this, I would still say that it was just ugly, bad art.)
You may well be a creative and imaginative person; I don't know you and I wouldn't want to judge! However, your image of a lemming was not the result of a creative process and so is not art.
I actually agree with that. I don't actually appreciate AI generated stuff more than what we see on the surface. It's not highly complex and I never said it was.
(I was just arguing AI generated stuff can be a means to an end and still carries a hint of creativity as stated by the original prompt. It's a tool. Personally, I detest nearly all of these LLM parlor tricks. I think people who were giving counter points thought I was pro-AI stuff when I really am not.)
Having ideas is not creativity. Creativity is creating the thing. If a billionaire pays a painter to create their idea, the artist is still the painter, not the billionaire commissioning the art. Replace the painter with AI and the logic doesn't change, the person putting the prompt is not an artist. It did not create the thing. The machine is not an artist either, as the human painter at least had consciousness, intention, agency, emotion,all things the machine doesn't have and cannot source from to create the art. This is why AI images always feel soulless, dry and boring. They don't produce any emotion on the audience because it had none to source from or communicate through the art. The prompt engineer is no artist but a commissionner to an inept soulless painter.
We are talking about a word with multiple definitions and it's getting philosophical now. Depending on where you look or what context you use, creativity is how you choose to define it. (I hate saying that here because, well, its philosophical and any back-and-forth rapidly becomes subjective. On the intertubes, that usually doesn't work out very well for discussion.)
https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/creativity/ - We may ask the same question not just of artworks but of any creative product, whether it be a new scientific theory, a technological invention, a philosophical breakthrough, or a novel solution to a mathematical or logical puzzle. (There is more to this regarding creative process, so feel free to read more.)
https://dictionary.apa.org/creativity - the ability to produce or develop original work, theories, techniques, or thoughts. A creative individual typically displays originality, imagination, and expressiveness.
A discussion about a definition is usually fruitless. I just have to cap this saying that I simply maintain that AI can be a tool for creating original art. (Art doesn't need to be a painting or a picture.) We, as creative humans, can create art with any tool we are given.
If you want to get philosophical, please do. I won't argue my point further that it still takes a human to provide creative input to get some kind of unique output.
I have a reply to most of the points you've brought up which I hope will help you see another perspective. Some things I hadn't even thought of until you wrote this (thanks). But I don't have time to write them all now, nor do I want to type it all out at my phone. Leaving this comment as a reminder.
Cool. I just realized how many definitions there are for the word "creativity", so I posted a reply to another comment that explains which one I was using. It may help frame a response for you, it may not. This is just an attempt to keep the forks in this road to a minimum. ;)
Well, to shorten everything down, there are few original building blocks. "Original art" can absolutely be original but, at the end of the day, is usually made up of large blocks of existing stuff. How those blocks function as a whole could be considered the "original" bit when talking about my specific arguments.
I mentioned music because there really aren't many methods that haven't been discovered and used hundreds of times over. If I had a nickel for everytime I sketched out a four-to-the-floor drum variation, I would be a wealthy man. (Nearly every EDM/House/Techno beat uses something like it.) Chord progressions and transitions are best learned from the classics: Beethoven, Mozart, etc.. (Hip-hop/Pop artists are notorious for trying to sue each other over sample theft even though the samples are generally common musical phrases... Eesh.. That is a mess of a situation, btw.)
But. Original art made with original components can still be made. This is a big world, after all.
To clarify though: I do not support the theft of data for the use of training AI. Period. I also don't particularly care for AI art, personally.
Ai is capitalism maximizing productivity and minimizing labour costs.
Ai isn’t targeting tedious labour, the people building these systems are going after art, music and the creative process. They want to take the human out of the equation and pump out more content to monetize at ever increasing rates.
Yes, because It's not art. I have a very liberal definition of art. I'd call John Cage's 4′33″ art. Art requires concious effort, an AI has no conciousness.
Edit: I thought the question was do you like AI art? I can't read apparently. I wouldn't say hate. I just don't respect it from an artstic standpoint.
When dalle came out first, it was fun to make like 10 stupid pictures and i literally never touched it again. Now every ai picture i see is like visual garbage to me. It's the plastic we can't get rid off, and it slowly replaces real pictures.
It's absolutely fascinating. I was really enjoying watching it evolve. That's tapered off a lot now.
But I also find it really off-putting when people use it for meaningless illustrations that just reek of laziness. Especially so when the images are supposed to represent something meaningful, but are full of errors and nonsense. This is particularly the case when the illustrations accompany academic texts. Fucking gross.
Probably if we lived in a society that didn't inventivise doing meaningless, environmentally destructive shit for profit, then I might be more into it now.
of course! aside from detracting from artists with actual talent and creativity, there is one example i’ve seen in my school that makes me hate it even more: teachers deciding to print out posters, flyers, etc. with obviously ai generated images, despite the fact that we have an entire art department in the school, full of students who’d be very much interested in making something up for them. even then, tools like canva and the sort are always available, hell, even mspaint could work! i’d rather see 10 poorly made posters than have to see one more ai image used in the school.
AI siphons the end result from the process involved to get there - a very human process. Scraping loads of work from artists to mimic a signature style or pop culture trends in art doesn't exactly scream innovation. Using AI to aide a creative process is one thing, but using it to generate imagery, claiming originality, and using it for internet clout is farcical, lazy, and an insult to artists.
Art is a skill honed over time and given life through the human experience - and the beautiful part is that when others interact with it, it connects them through their own experiences. I really do think AI cheapens that.
Depends on what it's used for. Looks tacky when used by big businesses, but looks fine if used by small independent people. Like dbzer0.com just uses them for blog thumbnails. But coca cola AI adverts? Ai bots spouting stuff on Facebook? Entirely AI generated websites (although that's moreso text)? Awful.
The second, I'm not sure. Some really talented artists have worked in advertisements for a long time, and many of their works are celebrated internationally. Alphonse Mucha is one name that quickly comes to mind - tell me his advertisement work isn't art. You have probably seen more amateur ripoffs of his style in your life than the real deal.
I don't consider it Art, but the specific reason I hate it is because it is meant to be an illusion of something that it's not, and it's crafted that illusion off the blood sweat and tears of people whom it treats as a line item in a database by people who don't respect it. It is fundamentally a bastardizarion of the creative soul and rather purposefully at that.
I mean, every highly contrasted media we've ever watched, just about, is about someone with a modicum of empathy struggling against a fascist with no empathy to their cause, and what is more fascist than diminishing or dilluting the perceived value of art to the public? Art is the only language allowed to those who are repressed.
But look at it this way. In 5 years nobody will be able to tell the difference between an AI image or AI music (boomers already can't). So then what? When an art gallery prints a 30 ft tall AI image and people come look at it and how amazing it is, all while having no idea it was AI, what will be the point? The only art left will be live performance art, which could actually be a good thing in it's own way. But the "at home" artist who only publishes works online will be dead, because there will be no way to tell the difference.
I hate that it’s built on theft. The idea of AI art is fine, but so much of it is just art theft. “Picture of A in the style of artist B.” That kind of shit really makes me hate AI art.
Yeah but only if it's professionally used. In a meme or something it's fine but it's gross when used in ads, logos, games, etc. It's so weird in profile pictures and wallpapers as well.
No. It’s useful when you need a quick picture for something or help visualizing something. A huge timesaver. I haven’t seen it generate anything good enough to be hung in an art museum, so I don’t really understand why anyone would hate it. It’s not really competition for actual art. Also, I want to say that I don’t think anyone’s art was “stolen”. That’s the same ludicrous argument the RIAA uses against online file sharing. Any images used in the training was downloaded, mathematically analyzed, and deconstructed. “Stolen” would require a heist at the museum.
What makes a Jackson Pollock painting so valuable? I've heard time and again people saying "I could do that too", "it's just paint thrown at canvas" etc. But it's not the actual paint on the canvas that makes the painting. It's Pollock's aesthetic sense that chose that color, that pattern, and that's what you get to see when you look at his paintings. It's an image that said something to him, and we have decided to put value on that.
The vast majority of AI generated imagery is not art just like the vast majority of people throwing paint at canvas won't get a Jackson Pollock painting. It might become art if used by an artist with purpose and intention. Which at the moment is pretty hard, given that small, iterative adjustments are really hard to do with AI. But in the end, AI is yet another tool that would allow humans a bit more freedom of expression.
It used to be that a painter had to literally prepare his palette from raw ingredients. Then he could buy pre-made paints. When digital art came along, we gave up paints entirely. Now we skip the painting part. The one common thread though is the honest expression of intent, and the feedback loop given by the artist's aesthetic sense. If either is missing, you get kitschy garbage. And that's most AI generated imagery these days.
Different strokes for different folks. In a hypothetical scenario where I'm a billionaire and buying a Pollock or an AI image in print and choosing what to hang in my bedroom, it for sure won't be someone throwing random splashes of colour. It's extremely boring and awkward.
No judgement, mate, art is a matter of taste. Always has been.
My point was more along these lines: every single piece of AI imagery in the public space has been selected and put there by a human. We are the feedback loop in this space. And if the vast majority of it sucks, well, that's saying something about the people doing the selection, doesn't it?
I read an article recently about the difficulties of using AI by artists in animation studios, which partly inspired my original reply. Sure, AI is great at, say, generating a magical fairy forest. But if it's almost good enough and you want it to do small, incremental improvements to an existing image, that's where it fails. Sure, it will generate another magical forest, but even using almost the same prompt can lead to wildly different results.
To wit: for me and you, almost is probably good enough. But that's not the case for a professional.
I remember reading something about Pollock way back on the early 2000s and finding a new appreciation for the work.
His pour paintings followed a fractal pattern, Pollock distilled an essence of nature and expressed it with mastery.
One can do it these days on a computer, if you know what to do, but he made it out of sense of art alone further cementing his genius.
Here is some more info: https://blogs.uoregon.edu/richardtaylor/2017/01/04/the-facts-about-pollocks-fractals/
The man is a genius, no doubt about it. I didn't know about the mathematical analysis of his paintings though, that's really cool. Thanks for the link.
Of course not, and I was not implying that either. I was merely illustrating the influence of technology on artistic expression.
Case în point: silkscreen collages, to stay in the analog domain. Andy Warhol is widely recognised as an artistic genius these days. That wasn't the case iback then.
Andy Warhol was one of the most popular and famous artist of his era, while he was alive. He was considered such a genious that he threw parties with Hollywood stars and millionaires. What are you on about? Are you just willfully ignorant? repeating some AI hallucinations? Who fed you these lies?
You seem to mistake popularity for acceptance. Warhol was hugely controversial in his day, especially in the beginning of his career (the Campbell Soup expo?). Most great artists are controversial, because they tend to push the status quo until it shatters.
And tone down the ad hominem, this isn't reddit, we're just having a conversation about art.
Pollock stole the whole idea from an east bloc woman who did "pouring" already.
Also, the art world in the USA was heavily CIA sponsored in the 50/60 to counter USSR cultural influence.
In my personal opinion, pollocks work isn't worth the paint he poured. It's just based on the idea that if you're the first to do it, it's "revolutionary", which it was for the impressionists and before, but not very much beyond, IMO.
It also lead to money laundring, and eventually selling a banana scotched to a wall for hundreds of thousands of dollars. That is not art.
Hey, I have that banana duct taped in my living room! 🤣
Art is subjective, always has been. I remember visiting a modern art museum in Germany years ago, and seeing a weed growing at the base of the wall in one of the rooms. Looking closer, I could see the weed was a very lifelike bronze cast, but in that moment the juxtaposition was jarring enough to make me question what art really is. I doubt it will have the same effect on everyone, but for me that was significant. And memorable, as you can see.
Hate is too strong of a word. AI art is sometimes freaky to look at, sometimes it's pretty. It is usually devoid of a certain intangible thing that you can get from human art, even shitty human art. But it's occasionally a fun toy too? I can't conjure up any strong feelings for AI images unto themselves.
I do have intense loathing for the capitalists who want to use that AI art to replace human work. And for the AI "Artists" who are enabling them by acting like this is the next evolution of art and anyone with concerns is just holding back "DA FUTER".
I also have concerns about the environmental/energy costs of AI -- Just in general. Not just AI Images or Chatbots or whatever. AI can be a good thing, a tool to help us. And even when it's useless, it's kinda fun to mess about with. But the energy and environmental costs of all that computing, especially the amount of it that is wasted because even if AI ultimately becomes a part of our lives, it is DEFINITELY a wasteful investment bubble right now -- THAT sucks. And THAT seems to have no obvious solution.
That’s entirely subjective. If I actually stop and look at it instead of just scrolling past, then there’s probably at least something good about it - to me. Someone else might still just scroll by.
Don't know about "art", but I use it sometimes to generate contextual imagery for blog posts and videos. I would've never hired an artist so the only real difference is that it looks a lot better than when I used to try to draw something myself.
it's extremely obvious and always seems as if they could do it with a real artist, 3d modeller and or an actor for less than 1% their budget, so it's extremely trashy
On the other hand, because it's so low effort me being able to realise it is AI also makes me feel disgusted, Atleast spend effort prompting it so it doesn't look like shit, I swear, lazy bastards
For solo developers that use it for games or backgrounds, it's not that bad, and it's usually temporary.
haha, i don't developing an algorithm related to AI. i was just asking because now, my people in my country are using AI to convert their pictures to Ghibli Studio's art style. just asking here people on Fedi about that.
I'm not a fan of AI generated stills, but I've seen a number of AI generated music videos that are kind of fun to watch. It's not so much the art itself, but the way it collapses from hallucination to hallucination repeatedly that just goes well with some music I guess. Theres obviously still a lot of work from actual artists to make it into a video and time it with music, and the music itself of course is still human (afaik). Here's a few examples I've seen, I'd love to know what people think of this style specifically, as opposed to the AI slop photos we are getting bombarded with. Especially if you hate it, I want to hear about why!
I'm not a fan of it as their are just certain details an AI can never do. A color here, a twist or turn there, a stroke this way, a drip in that place. It is something that one can't program to have AI even think to do. I do think AI has its place and is a good tool.
low effort crap is low effort crap no matter how it's made, that said, there is plenty of high quality, high effort AI art out there that has a lot of prompt engineering put into it; it is merely drowned out in a sea of sludge. It's just about as easy for someone to put in zero effort and churn out AI sludge as it is for them to scribble in MSPaint, the difference being scribbling in MSPaint usually has some level of charm to it for its simplicity. That doesn't mean the guy who spends a lot of time tweaking their prompt to get it exactly right isn't an artist, it means they create art with different tools. Whether you use a rattlecan and stencils, or pencils and paper, or paint and canvas, or a wacom tablet and stylus, or type in carefully crafted prompts, art is art is art is art. But if you don't spend the time required to get good at it, your art will be shit.
Also, watching the artist crowd melt down again saying "that's not real art!" is absolutely hilarious. Those who weren't around at the time may not remember, but when digital art was starting to become a thing, there were plenty of people who firmly attested that if it was digital, it wasn't "real" art. Watching the same set of creatives having the same meltdown ~30 years later, "REEEEE YOU CAN'T JUST USE TECHNOLOGY TO MAKE THE PROCESS EASIER", is extremely funny.
Like anything art generators are a tool. One that can be very useful in a creative process, to convey an idea that is hard to present in text, to explore variations on a concept without having to draw something a hundred times, etc. It would be very difficult to argue that something like that has no valid uses.
However, as it stands the majority of the tools in place cost a fair bit of money to set up and run and so there is a high barrier to entry, and so the profits made from running them end up going primarily to those who are rich enough to set them up in the first place. Wealth inequality is a massive issue right now and so this sours a lot of people against these tools.
Many people also subjectively dislike AI art, which is a fair comment, as all art is subjective, but I don't think it necessarily helps anyone to debate over whether it looks good or not, that shouldn't be the issue here.
You could argue that the root of the problem is that most users of these tools will never consider the repercussions of paying for them, the people they are supporting are obscured behind many layers and it is impossible for the average consumer to know what the recipient will do with those funds.
Like any tool, these machines have created a new way for the already powerful to exploit the weak, it may be abstracted away behind closed doors but it is happening.
However, as it stands the majority of the tools in place cost a fair bit of money to set up and run
You can get by with 4G of VRAM if all you want is to generate some pictures, or differently put every PC capable of 1080p gaming should do the trick. With good software (comfyui) you can do SDXL just fine, and almost crush SD1.
It's fine-tuning much less training models where things get expensive but there's other ways to get creative with those models. Training is only ever barely possible on gaming GPUs because those cap out at about 16G VRAM.
(Just for completeness' sake, for anyone wondering "why don't I just use my 32G worth of CPU RAM to supplement the VRAM?" -- that's already happening anyways. You need a minimum amount of VRAM or your box will be busier shuffling data from and to the GPU than it is actually doing calculations: Your GPU is going to thrash. If that happens it's probably faster to run the AI on the CPU and, well, it's just not build to run that kind of code).
AI “art” has made me realize how important part human behind art is to the point where I will never pay for any AI “art”. AI “art” is worthless and I would even say it devalues rest of the thing, if its part of some bigger whole like game for example. I do not want to see it, I dont want even glimpse. When I see AI “art”, its only a reminder to me of theft that has been done to make it happen and of some smarmy slimy techbro behind it. Whenever I see AI “art” only thing I feel is either sad or angry depending on day.
If I was religious type, Id even go as far as say I believe in soul now because how soulless AI “art” is.
I am fucking sick of it and deeply despise AI “art” in its entirety with every fiber of my being.
I am sure I will get downvoted to deepest depths by techbros and people who dont care and simply consume whatevers brought in front of them, use every AI filter they get their hands on. But hey, I was asked, I gave my answer.
They say imitation is the sincerest form of flattery.
I'm not exactly a visual artist who stands to lose something in this armsrace, but that's how I tend to look at it. As a software engineer I'm fascinated by the possibilities. There were people who despised the camera when it came to be. I firmly believe that once the AI hype dies down "real" human-made art will not have suffered any setback. At the end of the day this is still people building tools to imitate something worth imitating. Nothing is ever fully original.
If someone can't see the value in art that took actual human effort to make then that is on them. If a tool is built upon millions of existing pieces of human artistic effort to make it available to the general public I'd see this as less deplorable than copying a CD to a cassette tape in the 80s. If someone tried to make money by selling what is essentially other people's work then that is obviously a different story, no matter what is being misappropriated.
It's not art. Expanding the sense of the word to all kinds of nonsensical phenomena is both damaging art and artists as well.
I take the liberty of a personal definition of art, or if not definition, at least prerequisites for something to be considered art, and that is that art must be made by the hand of the artist and that it's conception must include deliberate thought/mental process of the artist.
It may not be the best definition, but I consider it to be good enough to draw a definite line between Michelangelo and the internet lady who vlogs about the art of tying your shoelaces or some similar shit.
For me it's on the same level as memes - not intended to be consumed as art, but merely as a form of posting. It's trash and that's fine.
But it shouldn't be elevated above that. It's derivative and stilted and lacks character, and worse, it might be depriving amateur artists the chance to flex their creative muscles and actually create art themselves.
Also draining cities dry of municipal water to generate a picture of a bored ape is probably a bad use of resources.
Most of it reminds me of that tacky clip art that got bundled with word processors and Corel Draw in the 90s. It’s just all got this “uncanny valley” sheen to it.
I am fine with AI art as long as its properly credited to its creato. Not the person who wrote a prompt to generate the image, not the company that created the program. The AI should be credited in a way that no person could confuse it for something someone made
If thats too hard, banning AI art is also fine. I havent seen any real use for it
Honestly, I find the vast majority of the arguments against it to be be made from a point of ignorance, propagated by a rabid sub-set of artists looking to generate clicks for their sensationalist YouTube videos.
I like playing around with it myself but I never upload it I just keep it on my computer cuz it's neat so I don't get why anyone else would upload AI generated stuff online
I don't hate it. I think it's fun as a sort of moment by moment ( I want to see this ) and just generate it and enjoy the wackyness. It does leave a lot to be desired in terms of composition and polish. I also absolutely hate people representing it as their own work. I also really enjoy art produced by people. I think what people produce is still superior in lots of ways. People are often telling a story with their art, and that really comes through. Also I love knowing the amount of thought and effort has gone into a work it makes it that much more impressive. The art people produce is often strongly influenced by art trends, culture, and life experience which we connect to as humans and AI can't produce that because it has no concept of these things. Sure AI can replicate that but it's not the same as the interaction and conversation I have with a piece of art produced by a person that I know must have felt certain ways about their work when producing it.
The Long answer is:
Like everything in art and life, If you can set it in right context it could also work. If you cannot, it's just bland and bad in the classic artistic craftmanship standard and modern art and Action Art.
I don't hate it, I think it has its uses, just like text generation. They're great for brainstorming ideas or quick unimportant stuff like RPG campaigns, so for example an in-game fake company logo or a poem to contain hints for the players.
However trying to use it for anything serious and final is stupid and dangerous. IMO any artist that had their art used to train a model should be able to claim royalties on anything created with that model, regardless of whether they can prove their art was used for the piece. And if the data used to train the model is not made public or can't be verified, then ANY artist can. Maybe just 1% of the profits direct or indirect of that art, so for example you used AI to generate part of an invitation for a party, 100 artists could start a lawsuit and take every single cent you earned from the party. After all you indirectly hired them, it's only fair they get paid, had you hired a single artist you could negotiate the price with them.
No, just see it as another medium . Extremely overhated
Tbf tho lotsa popular styles that show in AI art am indifferent towards (even dislike outright . Example : this's somehow even greater assault on the eyes than Alegria illustrations) , but that's bcus it's really hard to create (unique|distinctive) styles with current tech (source : tried developing style for >1 yr (find|combin)ing artist tags in furry models → (genn|tweak)ing ~20-30 training imgs Once satisfied → testing outputs of style LoRA trained with PixAI and result on merge models don't lꝏk like the training data at all . PAINFUL) and not criticism of genAI itself
If it came from stealing actual artists' work then I hate it. If they somehow generated it using all fairly sourced data then I don't care. Still would prefer an actual artists work and I'd certainly never knowingly pay for something generated by AI.
If I see a obviously AI generated picture as a thumbnail on youtube, I immediately block that creator. If I hear those awful AI voices reading text, same. If you want to share something with the world, put some effort into it.
Use case seems to just be dicking around, and that is just not worth the resources we pour into it.
Copyright infringement and other unethical practices in acquiring training data
Unimaginative AI art flooding the graphics market and the Internet
Taking work from actual artists that might generate something new
So much energy used on pointless, quickly forgotten "single-use art" in the middle of a climate crisis
Good:
Okay starting point for logos for eg. small associations or clubs, preferably treated as version 0.1 and later worked on, but still an affordable option, and more personalised than clipart
Creative visual outlet for people with no interest in developing their graphical skills, but who have an urge to get a small number of specific images out of their system
Probably a good media for some commentary on the relationship between real a unreal, familiar and alien cognition, and such, but that itself is such a cliche
As someone pointed out, do you like ads ?
Because AI content feel the same, it's annoying stuff I need to skip to access real content and on top of that it's an ecological disaster.
When I open an image or a page and realise it's AI, I feel the same as when I download a movie and it turns out I got a dot exe.
I like it for fun, memes, silly stuff, and inspiration to create something original.
I hate it for professional use. It all looks the same. And the kind of person using it professionally is 100% insufferably annoying and also so uncreative that whatever literal slop they put on marketplaces for Easy Money just falls flat and only makes pocket change from kids who don't know any better. And the kids deserve better, actual media with nuance and depth, things they can learn from and remember later on in life, not shallow meaningless slop to get them to look at car and phone ads while exposing them to sex, gore, pregnancy, and other things they aren't ready for.
I'm going to take a wide definition of the word 'art' here and apply it to all artistic methods.
Its not art. Art, almost by definition, partly reflects an emotional state the artist was in when creating the work. AI merely apes the output, not the necessary emotional connection. Its like the shitty music that used to play in lifts (elevators) in that it uses the output but is utterly soulless.
Its ethically way worse than piracy. If you pirate (for example) an ebook or music its more than likely because you want to escape DRM or some other type of controlling software designed to prevent you from actually having control over what you would otherwise have bought. LLM's steal not just that but the whole creative process. Its more than pirating a movie or track or book, its more akin to stealing the thought process from an artists mind and trying to replicate the process automatically.
It is, to me, just another example of making the whole of our international artistic culture a bland homogenized cesspit of crapness. Its capitalism's best way to profit from art as there's no one to pay. But we end of with ever decreasing quality. AI based art becomes like humanity in the matrix - used then liquidised to feed the next iteration.
And then there's also the environmental impact. The last thing the word needs right now is something else gobbling resources - especially when the end result is utter shit.
I don't consider it art either but not hating it since it offers you a different view on realism while trying to be realism. With silly results like pouring a mug of hot coffee out of the fingers 🤌, or carrying a shield backwards.
AI is just a fun toy. It can't make "art." There are CEOs out there fucking thirsty at the idea of a 59% unemployment rate because everyone else is cut out of their business, but AI can't do the job and they will learn that the hard way after fucking over a bunch of people.
Even the success stories seem skeptical. I use AI all the time at work to assist with coding, and beyond that I use it all the time for fun—my job is safe because AI is fucking awful at it.
So anyway I don't hate it per se, but I don't like it other than jokey shit. But I don't want to see it everywhere, either.
I don't hate AI-created images. I hate the insane amounts of energy required for current AI models. I hate that it's the same rich assholes who control everything also controlling AI. I hate that they monopolize access to models trained on all our work. And I hate that it will be these rich assholes benefiting from humans being put out of work by AI. Because this will happen on some scale.
If it were free, I'd love AI. Because it allows people who aren't artists to create stuff. And lowering the barrier of entry on art is always good, in my opinion.
Have you heard about AI Horde? It's a cluster of volunteer workers generating text and images for everyone for free.
You get credits by contributing your GPU to generate for others, but you can use the service without credits (or even an account), credits are there just to determine your position in the queue.
You can try it out for example on HordeNG (disclaimer: I created the HordeNG frontend).
I don't even consider AI generated images to be art since there is no expression of skill, imagination, or feeling in them.
I agree.To me art is an expression of the soul; it's an expression of one's perception of the world. It has spiritual qualities (in an atheist sense). There is an inner world that puts out together a piece of art that LLMs do not possess and that's why they need to train on existing material that comes from human expression.
I highly doubt an LLM suffers, loves, hopes, hates and cries like us. Art is an expression of who we are individualy and collectively. LLMs only hallucinate with art made by humans. While we humans can find inspiration from other artists, it is not a necessity to train on vast databases of art pieces to put something together. They say that while it's hard to define what art is, you know it when you see it. To me when I get that feeling from something made by AI, all I really see is a piece of an other artist's soul trapped in some sort of simulacrum put together by an algorithm.
Cut the training material and AI "art" will stagnate. We, on the other hand, won't.
That's why I think AI art will never really be art... unless if one day they somehow develop a "soul" themselves and start to express an inner world of their own.
Gaius Baltar enters the chat.
Exactly this.
It reminds me to those hyper-realistic paintings that were trendy 15 years ago, they were impresive feats of skill but by the fifth in a row they became boring. AI is the same but without the skill.
AI generation is a gradient from clean up to controlling every pixel.
If an artist draws the line art, does basic coloring, but has a network do the sharing, that's art. How far does that carry?
Surely, anything that had heart and soul poured into it is art, right? Text prompt, or otherwise. You don't have to resonate with it. You can be scared of it.
But you said imagination, feeling, skill make up art. It is bold, or naive, to think those who create AI works doesn't have these traits, like to say the hobbies, programmers, and the curious, aren't artists.
I tend to agree with that. I also hate that of all the great uses for generative AI, this is the direction they took the tech. It's not a replacement for whole jobs, and I knew that at the onset, but so many dumb business types thought it could replace entire departments, customer service, etc.
to be honest, i'm not only referring to images. any kind of what so called "art" since it's possible now to make "music" with AI. thanks for the response anyway.
Even if the image was regenerated with tweaked prompts until the generated image expressed what the prompter wanted to convey?
I don't think we're at the level AI prompting can be used to reflect the subtlety needed to make art. It's like chainsaw art, cool and mebbe art but it's not art like the old masters art.
Also everyone thinking that shitting out a Rembrandt liking image is fantastic does not understand what art really is.
The person inputting prompt modifications may have controlled the larger assets as a whole, but they did not curate the Gestalt of the image. If the input is text that a computer is to output as a literal estimation, then it is data, not art; if the input is data curated by a person who means for a computer to output it as plotted data, such as with a complex lineplot or 3D model or even text as ASCII images, then that can be art.
Yes even then. Writing a prompt is no more an artistic skill than describing your idea to an artist you're commissioning. You didn't create a damn thing. You will not be called an artist for commissioning a work.
Then it's still just a commissioned work
But would that then imply that all commissioned works aren't art?
Or does the difference of who (or more specifically what) you commission to produce something decide whether it's art?
An artist has done the art in question. That makes all the difference.
If the person using the paintbrush is the artist - not the brush itself - then why doesn’t the same logic apply to AI? It’s just a tool, after all. AI doesn’t generate anything on its own. Sure, you could ask it to spit out a picture with no effort, but you can do the same with a camera. However, if you have a clear vision of how you want the final result to look, it’s a different story. Getting AI to output an image is easy. Getting it to output your image - that’s hard.
It’s not hard. What are you, a „prompt engineer“?
If you asked a human to draw an image of what you describe, it would be easier and you still would not be considered an artist. So why should a "prompt engineer" be considered an artist?
Well, firstly, “art” and “artist” are human-invented concepts - they don’t exist in the real world, only in our minds - so in the end, we’re essentially debating semantics. That said, if you hire an artist, then yes, they’re the artist, not you. But I don’t think that same logic applies to AI, because it’s not making any decisions on its own. It’s a tool, just like a paintbrush, camera, or drums.
If an elephant paints a picture, is that art? And is the elephant the artist? If a child bangs on drums and is just making noise, is that art? Are they the artist? If I grab a camera, point it somewhere, and press a button, is that art? Am I the artist? Personally, I’d say each of those is easier to do than writing a prompt that actually produces the image you had in mind, yet I doubt you'd come telling me that my photography isn't art only becuse I didn't put enough effort into it.
I’m not hugely experienced with AI image generators, but I have played around with one, trying to get it to create a specific kind of picture I had in mind - and I’ve ended up with something like 70 variations, none of which quite hit the mark. I’ve already spent over four hours on this project, and if I somehow manage to figure out the right prompt and finally get the image I’m after, then yes - I’d say that’s art and I'm the artist.
In general - yes. There is a flood of shitty and lazy “art” that has infected search results and creative spaces. I’m also deeply uncomfortable with it being trained on artists work without their consent - for all the talk about it being equivalent to human inspiration I’m pretty sure there have been examples where it’s started generating attempts at signatures.
It’s terrible in knitting and crochet spaces (I imagine woodworking and sculpture and architecture too) because there are lots of things generated which are physical impossible and just wrong to anyone who enjoys the crafts. It gives false understandings of what those art forms look like.
I think the entire point of art is the human intentionality aspect. Art is humans using materials to do things that don’t serve an immediate practical purpose. There has to be some element of “desire” on the part of the artist.
So it’s not that it is impossible to use AI tools to generate art (there’s stochastic computer generated pieces from the 70s that are lovely iirc) To me though, the way these tools are used is what is important - if you’re using an AI you’re training and adjusting yourself, if you’re spending hours tweaking prompts and perhaps sifting through hundreds of pictures to combine and really participate in “making” something.
The current trend is really just a bunch of content sludge. I don’t see the appeal in either the process of creation or in what can be appreciated from it. The best stuff is mostly memey topical political jokes, where it rests more on the symbols rather than the art itself.
Like, when I make art - my process is adding layers over weeks and weeks. It’s noticing that I don’t like the way this section looks, so I go back over it, come back to it later… it’s a process - I engage with and shape the work. I’m just a guy who glues trash to things and paints them, my art doesn’t really have external value - but it still feels like art in a way that getting Midjourney to make pictures of Gandolf with big honking naturals isn’t.
What I hate about AI art: How it's based on stolen work. How it is purpose built to replace real, talented artists and devalue their labor. How it uses way more energy than it needs to and is pretty wasteful
What I love about AI art: Instant stupid shit for meme madness.
If AI art was all just stupid jokey shit like this that a friend of mine made when we were discussing how people were making Ghibli-fied versions of important moments in history, and we decided to go with "George Bush doesn't care about black people" but make Mike Myers dressed as Austin Powers, I'd be okay with it entirely. It's not for profit by devaluing artists and using this work instead of a real artists work, it's just stupid shit that makes us laugh. Everything else aside, I can get behind stupid shit that makes us laugh. The rest of the issues with AI art suck though.
I'm with you on this one. I have no issues with AI being used for shit posting and memes, other than the ecological impact I guess.
It's soulless. A mere imitation.
I'm not entirely against LLMs as a tool, but I especially despise the image-based LLMs. They are certainly neat for some fun things. I've used them a little bit here and there for a dumb profile picture or a "I'm kinda thinking about this..." Brainstorm, but even in those cases I noticed the capabilities of the LLM and its tendencies quite literally pidgeon hole my artistic vision and push me in other directions that felt less and less creative. (Sidenote: I feel the same way about coding LLM tools. The longer I use them at any given time, the less creative I feel and it has a noticeable impact on my interest in the code I'm writing. So I don't really use them much. Also I consistently manage to point out coding LLM code in PR reviews because it's always kinda funky)
I've avoided using AI art tools for a while now. I'll consider some limited use if the cost, billionaire ownership, blatant theft of real IP without compensation, and environmental impact problems are solved. (No, an "open source" model doesn't solve all of these problems, especially since nearly all open source models are not truly open source and are almost always benefiting from upstream theft)
You know what I do like about AI art? I like the older Google machine learning art experiments from the mid-2010s. They invoked a strange existential curiosity. But those weren't done with LLM's.
Outside of LLMs, I like that there are some newer tools for editing that can do a better "lasso" select, that can mix and match into brushes as an alternative to something more algorithmic, the audio plugin that uses a RNN to simplify or expand upon an audio technique. Things that are tools that can be chosen or avoided and have nothing to do with LLMs.
I honestly cannot wait for this bubble to burst and for these tools to return to a cost that they'd need to be for these companies to turn a profit. A higher cost would eliminate all this casual use that is making people worse at research, critical thinking, and creativity, as well as make the art tools less competitive to just paying artists, even for scumbags wanting to cut the artists out. And it'd incentivize non-LLM, non-insanely costly ML techniques again instead of the current "LLMs for everything" nonsense right now.
It's pleasant to see such a long post so full of good takes. Nice work!
I'm not sure hate is the right word. When you've got someone stabbing you in the back multiple times, is it really hate you're feeling toward them? Or is it anger, fear, and danger?
I "hate" it in the sense that it's built on theft and requires the exploitation of underpaid workers to develop and maintain it. I "hate" it in the sense that we're living on a burning cinder with dwindling fresh water resources and "AI" is adding fuel to the fire. I "hate" it in the sense that it's being used to further undervalue artists and writers. I "hate" it in the sense that it fills our spaces with crap that so often looks like it was cribbed off of Rapunzel, Wreck-It-Ralph, and some other things.
I don't hate the "art." The AI can't do much about it.
What I strongly dislike is people who manage to draft literally 40 words or less and think they "created" something.
You didn't. You a mathematical model to do something for you. You therw 175 tokens into a whirlpool and got am 87% what you wanted image out. If you even had an idea of what you wanted before hand.
I don’t hate AI art. I hate people who pretend they’re artists when all they do is writing prompts.
Yes, I hate it. I hate that it fills every image platform. It is not art at all.
It’s a fun toy thing and can make decent images but its not art and can never replace actual art. When you compare for example an anime art of someone who actually drew it and the AI image, the drawn art is 9 out of 10 times better.
It’s also petty pretty easy to spot whether an image is AI or drawn made.
Doubt. Most studies have shown that people are horrible at actually picking out AI art. You suffer from selection bias because you don't realise which ones you didn't spot.
That implies it's solely about quality? At the inevitable point where AI gen gets better than drawn art, is the AI gen image now art too?
Firstly, it's not art. I already hate that OP called it that. It's AI generated imagery. There is no art involved outside of art theft.
Secondly, it's legal art theft created by those types of people that either never considered artists to have any value, or have a chip on their shoulder against artists.
Thirdly, at no point in history have artists ever been appreciated, despite art being the most important element of everything. Imagine right now what a user interface would look like without artistic design. Or a car. Or your toothbrush. AI gen shafts artists... again... with the absolutely ridiculously, flippant argument that it "democratises art", as if it's some sort of noble privilege rather than a skill literally anyone can practice.
i'm not only referring to images, but all kind of "art" that can be music, imagery, etc.
The same can be applied to all artistic mediums. But it's arguably used most for generating text and images.
yeah i know, that's why you hating on me by me, saying it's "art" but supposed to be "AI generated imagery". we can make "music" from AI now. thanks for your response anyway!
Art is cool cos it’s like holy shit a person did that!?
If it’s just an algorithm it’s not very impressive.
I hate those who call themselves artists when they're just commissioning a computer to make a picture for them. I also hate it when those same people deny the unethical aspects of AI generation.
Edit: to add more, I also hate the AI images themselves. They are filling up the internet with slop. This is very annoying, and the same goes for LLMs. I don't want to get AI generated results when I didn't search for them specifically.
Pretty much sums up my thoughts as well. Don't try to pass it off as your creation. I have zero skill and like using it to make dumb stuff like a Xenomorph twerking for my most recent request. Had a speech to text typo that created what is possibly the best gibberish meme I've ever seen. But again, I am completely honest about it, as if it would've been hard to tell anyways.
Here's a screenshot of the typo prompt and result.
It's ruined art for me. Someone posts something, and I don't know if it's real art or a theft of other people's work.
That's the problem. We can't tell the difference.
No, because I don't have an irrational fear of AI. I don't like when poor or unfitting AI art is used, but it isn't AI who makes that decision to use it.
As an artist who had her art stolen for usage in AI, I hate AI generated images for several reasons. I've personally had my art stolen to be used in a prompt without my permission, and said art got mangled so much that it looked terrible. AI image generators scrape the internet for art so they can amalgamate these pieces of art together to correspond to a prompt, and this art is taken without the permission of the artists. In some AI generated images, the mangled remnants of artists' signatures are still visible. Beyond art theft, it's instant gratification with zero effort. A huge part of why I appreciate art is because someone made it, someone spent potentially hours to create this beautiful picture! When I look at my old art, I can instantly get a feel for what vibes I had going through my mind at the time, like I could almost take a peek into my past self's brain, and this applies to other artist's work too!
Prompting an AI image generator, in my eyes, is like prompting an artist to draw something for you, except that artist turns out to be someone who traces bits of other people’s art without their permission, or copy and pastes it. Sometimes AI generated images aren't immediately recognizable, so me and a lot of other artists have tried to make it a trend to post progress pictures and other receipts along with our art.
Art is an attempt to communicate (usually to communicate something of the human condition). Current 'art' AI is too far away from intelligence to have anything to communicate. All it can do is mindlessly try to copy and blend what it's seen before without understanding it.
I don't hate it, but I also don't value it.
I'm an artist / writer and I don't see problem with generative AI when you're at a really early concept stage. Exploring ideas, try to get over creative blocks, that sort of stuff. Maybe the AI hallucinations and fuckups can give you ideas worth exploring.
But using them as a literal basis for artwork you work further on is a fool's errand. It's easier to maybe take ideas from there, but work from scratch anyway. And I do realise that even that is controversial.
Also, could be a legal quagmire. Also not happy about the copyright appropriation situation or the environmental impact.
Not a fan. It admittedly can be an amusing toy - type something in and wow look what it did! But the costs are high, and our society isn't a utopia where people don't need to labor for survival.
Maybe if we were post scarcity it wouldn't matter that much. But we're not, and this AI stuff is going to hurt labor, benefit the ownership class, and probably be mildly bad for end users too.
AI art is fine being used as a tool. What I have a problem with is it's users calling themselves "artists".
A person who types a prompt into an AI is no different than a person who hires a painter and describes what he wants them to paint.
Just because that "painter" in the first case happens to be a computer, that doesn't mean that by default the title of "artist" defaults back to the person who wrote the prompt. That person is still just someone telling someone (or something) what to draw.
In other words, you don't become the artist just because you eschew paying an actual artist and instead have your computer do it for you.
I see this view a lot and I agree with it, but how can you argue with anyone who says well, that's what they said about synthesizers for music. Or ipads for art. Or computers replacing typewriters. Are you saying anyone who doesn't hand write a book in cursive while solely learning the djembe from a scroll is not a real artist ? (Obvious /s but it's kind of valid). Unfortunately we are the old man yelling at cloud, just 20 years too early. The future will laugh that there were AI detractors (in my opinion).
Everything you've mentioned are tools for an artist to use to express THEIR talent. A typewriter doesn't come up with the words. a Synthesiser doesn't compose the the music that its playing. Comparinging AI (which requires zero talent) is disingenuous.
To put it another way, if you're a carpenter using hammers and saws (tools), and then some engineer creates a robot that can be programmed to do that job and allows them to fire all the carpenters. Does that make the programmers carpenters even though not a single one has used a circular saw.
The line between "tool" and "crutch" is drawn by how much talent and training it takes to use it.
AI is NOT used as a tool in that traditional sense, its a shortcut to fake talent in ways that hammers, paintbrushes, typewriters and even just good old fashioned traditional Photoshop aren't..
You have to have the training and talent to get use out of a real tool. And AI certainly potential for use in that regard; proofreading, background removal, grammar checking etc...
Your comment made me think of DJs. Not "real" musicians? Seems like a similarly-structuree argument.
DJs use the tools to express THEIR talent. They don't just say "create a composition that sounds good". That's the difference between an artist and a fraud.
Are modern DJs musicians as compared to a classically trained cellist (sp?)? In my thoughts, not really.
Yes. It's flooding places, and suddenly people decided that "smooth looking" was the absolute end goal of any drawing/music/creation/etc. It's not. Some of the most famous art piece are completely wrong, some aren't. That's not the endgoal. Nobody's gonna care that you can take that very simplified drawing and "generate" an extremely high-detail, fully shaded image that looks like it, as it was never the purpose.
Creative direction, intent, consistency (or absolute lack of consistency), execution, style, and a lot more goes into any creation, art or not. That's what make a piece feel interesting. There's a reason even now, with generated content being plausible as far as glaring mistakes go, we can still point out which image "feels" AI across a lot of different styles. At best, to remove that feeling of it being wrong, you'd have to spent a lot of time on the output of a model to touch it up everywhere and change details, which requires time and proficiency, which a lot of people jumping on that trend definitely lacks. Some of the worst results I've seen have been from people trying to make other "pay" for their output.
There's also the issue of how these works. For decades, creative people (among other) have been sued by big companies, some very harshly, to protect IP from such overexploitation as "using a three second excerpt in a video" or "using the vague likeness of a character". And now, these same targets are getting fleeced of their work by more big companies under the cheer of the people. That's a gut feeling of disgust right there. Combined with the utter lack of creativity in these, we're really watching the potential death of an activity (artistic creation), and that's not a good place to be. If one wants to argue that "generated art" is also a form of creation, keep in mind that these models can't be trained on generated pieces without extreme prejudice. Killing the very source they need to operate does not seem like a good long-term plan. But who cares about long-term when you can make a quick buck, right?
I'd also like to point out that all this rambling is about generated content that goes from "output of a model" to "final piece" with little to no afterthought. The "common" piece, where people will be happy to see twenty broken pieces because "well, there's a lot of them, so it's good". AI and LLM models, as a tool, may or may not be useful in the long term, but I can see smaller applications, even for art. A lot of menial tasks can be improved, general posing, references, simple background that are marginally considered part of the product, guides, etc. Taking something you've drawn/created, and locally use an AI "filter" to remove an extra line cleanly or touch up a mistake you want out? Great. The tool carries the intent of the artist, the same way a pen do.
But AI generated content? Make a prompt, a stick-figure sketch, and call it a day? These, IMO, will always look and taste like garbage, no matter how pretty they look. Because it was never "pretty" we were looking for.
Hate it? Yes. Respect people who use it? No.
I don't hate AI art. I hate AI art being passed off as "traditional" art.
As an artist I'm conflicted. I like new technology and methods and mediums, but it's entirely unethical to make models on unconsenting artists with no compensation or recognition.
i feel you
Almost all of the images generated by AI models are just eye candy and not art. It can be eye candy based on a bunch of art, but it still isn’t artistic. It’s often just an image aimed at farming engagement. “Here’s a picture so that your algorithms don’t ignore my post. Do I have your attention now?”
I feel old because I remember when this conversation was happening with airbrushing photographs and then Photoshop.
And now these days, really good Photoshop is invisible. We can remove people from backgrounds. We can improve the lighting. Movie CGI is just photoshooting stills.
AI will reach that stage too, where it will be so good, it's scary that you can't tell.
Lol, removing things from backgrounds and stuff is also AI
That's a task that probably would be better served by purpose-built machine learning. Using "AI" for that isn't what anyone means by "AI art" though.
It's fun to play around with but it has zero value and wherever I see it used anywhere I cringe
i feel you lol
It's got some value. It can help an actual artist with establishing stuff like composition or poses and the like.
If you try, you'll find it very difficult to actively tell the ai to generate anything specific
It's just generate a bunch and see if you get lucky and get what you wanted
I don't hate it, some of the images generated look awesome. But that's just an image that "literally anyone could do". It's the equivalent of instant lamen or cup noodles.
Afaik, it can't come up with new styles and most of the stuff pumped out just wholesale copies existing stuff: the majority either looks like a Disney 3d animation, or fancy anime-esque render. Some try to look like realistic oil paintings, those look cool and pretty, but nothing worth making a poster.
I think the only people, besides tech bros, who are happy with this are those that hate giving art any value.
Yes, as it conveys nothing more than the prompt it was given. Art is a means of communication, but when all it does is chop up pictures it’s seen to match a prompt there just isn’t anything to analyze.
It may look pretty in the moment, but lacks all substance and will be forgotten as quickly as it was generated.
Just playing devil's advocate here. Let me lay out some counter points .. (it'll take me an edit or two to format this right, btw.)
Instructing a machine to assemble bits in a specific way takes creativity. My prompt to AI is that creativity and without it, you can't even get much of a copy of anything. Even though AI is generally assembling stolen bits, the end result (ignoring copyright law) can be original.
Music has been mostly "figured out" and many songs we have heard over your lifetime use many of the same exact chord progressions. I-V-vi-IV being one of the most common and used in the following songs:
Journey -- "Don't Stop Believing"
James Blunt -- "You're Beautiful"
Black Eyed Peas -- "Where Is the Love"
Alphaville -- "Forever Young"
Jason Mraz -- "I'm Yours"
Train -- "Hey Soul Sister"
The Calling -- "Wherever You Will Go"
Elton John -- "Can You Feel The Love Tonight" (from The Lion King)
I assert that given the correct instructions, you can still give someone plenty to analyze, via prompt, that has enough detail to extract a deeper meaning:
FWIW, I am extremely fed up with this AI hype now. "AI" is just a tool, and that is it. I could go on for hours about this mess, but I am trying to make a valid point: Regardless of how you interpret copyright, art is just self-expression.
There are endless examples I could give about technique re-use when it comes to creating art with machines. From my perspective, a particular brush stroke might be the same as using a specific bit at a particular depth of cut on a CNC. The art theft for AI training is one aspect, for sure. The biggest issue I see is that many people don't understand how to create original art and the AI just spits out a copy of something it was trained on and something the user already saw.
Edit: After reading many of the other comments here, many people have a strange definition of "art". Yes, art can be about communication, it can be about sending a message, it can express a style of creativity or hundreds of other things.
Art is just.. art. It's something a person sketches, composes, speaks, signs or farts. You don't have to like it or agree with it. Hell, you don't even need to recognize something as art for it to be art. Art is just self-expression. It's a feeling that is converted into some kind of other medium that others might happen to see, feel or hear, smell, taste or a combination of all of those things.
As much as I hate to admit it, a banana taped to a wall is art. Someone eating said banana is also art. I think it's fucking stupid, but who am I to not call it someone's self-expression?
That some, most or all art is partly or wholly derivative of other art is not relevant because the process used by 'AI' does not resemble the artistic process. When Shakespeare wrote Hamlet (a work derived from an older play, itself derived from an older myth which itself had been through countless retellings, variations and translations), he did not do what an LLM does, which is approximately to say: 'It's statistically likely that the phrase "to be" will be followed by the phrase "or not to be"'. Putting together statistical likelihoods is not creativity. This alone shows that AI 'art' is not creative and therefore not art at all.
Additionally, instructing a machine to make things from prompts does not require creativity. Creativity is not 'having ideas'; it's an ongoing process. When you tell an image generator to make an image, you're not asking it to create something, because it cannot do it. You're saying 'Show me the statistically likely output for this input'. Again, this statistical generator is not the same as, nor is it comparable to, the human imaginative process.
Example: My picture of the Lemming.
I knew exactly what I wanted before I even typed in the prompt: My vision was for a nervous, burned-out lemming to be sitting on a log, hunched over a laptop smoking a cigarette with bloodshot eyes surrounded in crushed beer cans.
That is not creative? Saying I have no imagination or creativity is kinda rude and giving all my credit to AI is downright insulting. Sure, I didn't draw it and I absolutely do not have the ability to draw it. However, you cannot (reasonably) deny that the idea is mine. I'm not exactly the most creative person in the world, but damn.... (The image will show up under my username over at least two instances over the span of 1-2 years? It's mine, is my point.)
If you saw my edit, you should know exactly what I thought when you said "artistic process".
However, my underlying point about derivative process or technique was to shoot a hole in the arguments of "cobbled together bits from wherever" and why I specifically used music as an example. Drum lines are openly copied. Not derived: blatantly copied. It's considered a compliment in many cases, actually. Progressions and transitions are all just copies. You don't even need AI to "statistically generate" music patterns. With every chord I choose to start a progression, there are only X number of chords that will work correctly after it.
I believe there have been some projects to generate (within reason) every chord progression possible and every kind of melody that would fit it... statistically. Almost every bit of popular music you hear is a derivative or a copy or reused or whatever, is my point. How many times have you heard the "Amen break"? More times than you actually know, unless you know your music, then you do. Much of music is just, for lack of a better term, math.
Creativity is an idea or multiple ideas. It's anything that exceeds the sum of your existing knowledge. AI by itself isn't "creative" and it is impossible for AI to be creative, we both agree. Again, from my perspective, AI can be used as a tool to fill in the gaps between two different ideas. It's the assembly of different ideas or components that is important. The sum of the key bits.
In my CAD work, I use formulas and simulated physics to automatically generate connecting features or structures. Are the designs I create exempted from "art" because of that?
Putting creativity and art into a box and saying you must follow "creative process" or "artistic process" is just odd. You can think that way if you want, but it's very limiting. The artists I study make a habit of saying "fuck the rules, fuck the process and do what makes you feel good."
Just for lulz, I was wondering what another machine would think of my Lemming. It kinda got it, but kinda didn't. Statistically, it figured out the parts, but you should know darn well what my intent was:
Again, you've written quite a long comment, almost none of which is pertinent.
Music is not math. Some aspects of it can be expressed mathematically, yes, but that's not the same thing.
Imagining the idea 'I'd like to see an image of a lemming', which is what you've done, does require some imagination. However, the output is not art because the process used to go from your 'prompt' to the image was not a creative one. (Also, this isn't entirely pertinent, but the image output is really bad. If it had been made by a person and otherwise looked like this, I would still say that it was just ugly, bad art.)
You may well be a creative and imaginative person; I don't know you and I wouldn't want to judge! However, your image of a lemming was not the result of a creative process and so is not art.
Sorry if you couldn't see my points, but that is OK.
I'll go off and create some corporate logos then...
The problem is AI art can never be any deeper than the prompt and can never hold up to anything more than a surface level analysis.
I actually agree with that. I don't actually appreciate AI generated stuff more than what we see on the surface. It's not highly complex and I never said it was.
(I was just arguing AI generated stuff can be a means to an end and still carries a hint of creativity as stated by the original prompt. It's a tool. Personally, I detest nearly all of these LLM parlor tricks. I think people who were giving counter points thought I was pro-AI stuff when I really am not.)
Having ideas is not creativity. Creativity is creating the thing. If a billionaire pays a painter to create their idea, the artist is still the painter, not the billionaire commissioning the art. Replace the painter with AI and the logic doesn't change, the person putting the prompt is not an artist. It did not create the thing. The machine is not an artist either, as the human painter at least had consciousness, intention, agency, emotion,all things the machine doesn't have and cannot source from to create the art. This is why AI images always feel soulless, dry and boring. They don't produce any emotion on the audience because it had none to source from or communicate through the art. The prompt engineer is no artist but a commissionner to an inept soulless painter.
We are talking about a word with multiple definitions and it's getting philosophical now. Depending on where you look or what context you use, creativity is how you choose to define it. (I hate saying that here because, well, its philosophical and any back-and-forth rapidly becomes subjective. On the intertubes, that usually doesn't work out very well for discussion.)
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Creativity - Creativity is the ability to form novel and valuable ideas or works using one's imagination.
https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/creativity/ - We may ask the same question not just of artworks but of any creative product, whether it be a new scientific theory, a technological invention, a philosophical breakthrough, or a novel solution to a mathematical or logical puzzle. (There is more to this regarding creative process, so feel free to read more.)
https://dictionary.apa.org/creativity - the ability to produce or develop original work, theories, techniques, or thoughts. A creative individual typically displays originality, imagination, and expressiveness.
A discussion about a definition is usually fruitless. I just have to cap this saying that I simply maintain that AI can be a tool for creating original art. (Art doesn't need to be a painting or a picture.) We, as creative humans, can create art with any tool we are given.
If you want to get philosophical, please do. I won't argue my point further that it still takes a human to provide creative input to get some kind of unique output.
thanks for dropping the definitions here :D
so there's no thing called "thinking creatively"?
I have a reply to most of the points you've brought up which I hope will help you see another perspective. Some things I hadn't even thought of until you wrote this (thanks). But I don't have time to write them all now, nor do I want to type it all out at my phone. Leaving this comment as a reminder.
Cool. I just realized how many definitions there are for the word "creativity", so I posted a reply to another comment that explains which one I was using. It may help frame a response for you, it may not. This is just an attempt to keep the forks in this road to a minimum. ;)
based on your points (2 and 3), do you think there are no more "original art" in this world?
Well, to shorten everything down, there are few original building blocks. "Original art" can absolutely be original but, at the end of the day, is usually made up of large blocks of existing stuff. How those blocks function as a whole could be considered the "original" bit when talking about my specific arguments.
I mentioned music because there really aren't many methods that haven't been discovered and used hundreds of times over. If I had a nickel for everytime I sketched out a four-to-the-floor drum variation, I would be a wealthy man. (Nearly every EDM/House/Techno beat uses something like it.) Chord progressions and transitions are best learned from the classics: Beethoven, Mozart, etc.. (Hip-hop/Pop artists are notorious for trying to sue each other over sample theft even though the samples are generally common musical phrases... Eesh.. That is a mess of a situation, btw.)
But. Original art made with original components can still be made. This is a big world, after all.
To clarify though: I do not support the theft of data for the use of training AI. Period. I also don't particularly care for AI art, personally.
thanks for your opinion 🙂
It is not art.
Ai is capitalism maximizing productivity and minimizing labour costs.
Ai isn’t targeting tedious labour, the people building these systems are going after art, music and the creative process. They want to take the human out of the equation and pump out more content to monetize at ever increasing rates.
It’s an insult to life itself.
Yes, because It's not art. I have a very liberal definition of art. I'd call John Cage's 4′33″ art. Art requires concious effort, an AI has no conciousness.
Edit: I thought the question was do you like AI art? I can't read apparently. I wouldn't say hate. I just don't respect it from an artstic standpoint.
it's fucking annoying. it looks like shit. it's boring the hell out of me
When dalle came out first, it was fun to make like 10 stupid pictures and i literally never touched it again. Now every ai picture i see is like visual garbage to me. It's the plastic we can't get rid off, and it slowly replaces real pictures.
plastic is a really good analogy actually. it's just too cheap and convenient
I think it's fascinating. I don't think it holds the same reverence as man-made art by any means, but I still find it impressive.
It's absolutely fascinating. I was really enjoying watching it evolve. That's tapered off a lot now.
But I also find it really off-putting when people use it for meaningless illustrations that just reek of laziness. Especially so when the images are supposed to represent something meaningful, but are full of errors and nonsense. This is particularly the case when the illustrations accompany academic texts. Fucking gross.
Probably if we lived in a society that didn't inventivise doing meaningless, environmentally destructive shit for profit, then I might be more into it now.
of course! aside from detracting from artists with actual talent and creativity, there is one example i’ve seen in my school that makes me hate it even more: teachers deciding to print out posters, flyers, etc. with obviously ai generated images, despite the fact that we have an entire art department in the school, full of students who’d be very much interested in making something up for them. even then, tools like canva and the sort are always available, hell, even mspaint could work! i’d rather see 10 poorly made posters than have to see one more ai image used in the school.
Environmental impacts 🤷
I can't say that I am a fan.
AI siphons the end result from the process involved to get there - a very human process. Scraping loads of work from artists to mimic a signature style or pop culture trends in art doesn't exactly scream innovation. Using AI to aide a creative process is one thing, but using it to generate imagery, claiming originality, and using it for internet clout is farcical, lazy, and an insult to artists.
Art is a skill honed over time and given life through the human experience - and the beautiful part is that when others interact with it, it connects them through their own experiences. I really do think AI cheapens that.
Depends on what it's used for. Looks tacky when used by big businesses, but looks fine if used by small independent people. Like dbzer0.com just uses them for blog thumbnails. But coca cola AI adverts? Ai bots spouting stuff on Facebook? Entirely AI generated websites (although that's moreso text)? Awful.
No it looks bad on dbzer0 as well. Have they heard of... stock images?
What if there's some thing very specific you need that stock imgs can't easily provide ?
Not 100% specific images > ugly images
Stock images are a whole category of awful of their own.
That cost an exorbitant amount of money?
Free stock images and royalty free images exist
I prefer real people and real artwork hand painted or hand drawn. Yes, doing it digital with your hand and mouse count as hand made.
Art is about expressing one emotion from one person to another.
We have a word for fake pictures: advertising.
The first phrase is true.
The second, I'm not sure. Some really talented artists have worked in advertisements for a long time, and many of their works are celebrated internationally. Alphonse Mucha is one name that quickly comes to mind - tell me his advertisement work isn't art. You have probably seen more amateur ripoffs of his style in your life than the real deal.
I don't consider it Art, but the specific reason I hate it is because it is meant to be an illusion of something that it's not, and it's crafted that illusion off the blood sweat and tears of people whom it treats as a line item in a database by people who don't respect it. It is fundamentally a bastardizarion of the creative soul and rather purposefully at that.
I mean, every highly contrasted media we've ever watched, just about, is about someone with a modicum of empathy struggling against a fascist with no empathy to their cause, and what is more fascist than diminishing or dilluting the perceived value of art to the public? Art is the only language allowed to those who are repressed.
But look at it this way. In 5 years nobody will be able to tell the difference between an AI image or AI music (boomers already can't). So then what? When an art gallery prints a 30 ft tall AI image and people come look at it and how amazing it is, all while having no idea it was AI, what will be the point? The only art left will be live performance art, which could actually be a good thing in it's own way. But the "at home" artist who only publishes works online will be dead, because there will be no way to tell the difference.
I hate that it’s built on theft. The idea of AI art is fine, but so much of it is just art theft. “Picture of A in the style of artist B.” That kind of shit really makes me hate AI art.
I hate it because of the theft.
It's possible AI could be interesting but the current iteration is garbage.
Does anyone else feel ill when seeing some AI images? It's like an out of tune piano for me
Yeah but only if it's professionally used. In a meme or something it's fine but it's gross when used in ads, logos, games, etc. It's so weird in profile pictures and wallpapers as well.
Huh. AI pics don't bother me but I get that exact feeling looking at most optical illusions.
some times i do :)
No. It’s useful when you need a quick picture for something or help visualizing something. A huge timesaver. I haven’t seen it generate anything good enough to be hung in an art museum, so I don’t really understand why anyone would hate it. It’s not really competition for actual art. Also, I want to say that I don’t think anyone’s art was “stolen”. That’s the same ludicrous argument the RIAA uses against online file sharing. Any images used in the training was downloaded, mathematically analyzed, and deconstructed. “Stolen” would require a heist at the museum.
Good for memes, bad for the environment.
I don't hate it, in fact I use it a lot for my D&D game nights - not being an artist myself.
I think it substracts from everything but itself. That is on its own, its pretty cool. But it's gross when it's used as part of a bigger project.
I do, but not for the reasons you think.
What makes a Jackson Pollock painting so valuable? I've heard time and again people saying "I could do that too", "it's just paint thrown at canvas" etc. But it's not the actual paint on the canvas that makes the painting. It's Pollock's aesthetic sense that chose that color, that pattern, and that's what you get to see when you look at his paintings. It's an image that said something to him, and we have decided to put value on that.
The vast majority of AI generated imagery is not art just like the vast majority of people throwing paint at canvas won't get a Jackson Pollock painting. It might become art if used by an artist with purpose and intention. Which at the moment is pretty hard, given that small, iterative adjustments are really hard to do with AI. But in the end, AI is yet another tool that would allow humans a bit more freedom of expression.
It used to be that a painter had to literally prepare his palette from raw ingredients. Then he could buy pre-made paints. When digital art came along, we gave up paints entirely. Now we skip the painting part. The one common thread though is the honest expression of intent, and the feedback loop given by the artist's aesthetic sense. If either is missing, you get kitschy garbage. And that's most AI generated imagery these days.
Different strokes for different folks. In a hypothetical scenario where I'm a billionaire and buying a Pollock or an AI image in print and choosing what to hang in my bedroom, it for sure won't be someone throwing random splashes of colour. It's extremely boring and awkward.
No judgement, mate, art is a matter of taste. Always has been.
My point was more along these lines: every single piece of AI imagery in the public space has been selected and put there by a human. We are the feedback loop in this space. And if the vast majority of it sucks, well, that's saying something about the people doing the selection, doesn't it?
I read an article recently about the difficulties of using AI by artists in animation studios, which partly inspired my original reply. Sure, AI is great at, say, generating a magical fairy forest. But if it's almost good enough and you want it to do small, incremental improvements to an existing image, that's where it fails. Sure, it will generate another magical forest, but even using almost the same prompt can lead to wildly different results.
To wit: for me and you, almost is probably good enough. But that's not the case for a professional.
I remember reading something about Pollock way back on the early 2000s and finding a new appreciation for the work. His pour paintings followed a fractal pattern, Pollock distilled an essence of nature and expressed it with mastery. One can do it these days on a computer, if you know what to do, but he made it out of sense of art alone further cementing his genius. Here is some more info: https://blogs.uoregon.edu/richardtaylor/2017/01/04/the-facts-about-pollocks-fractals/
The man is a genius, no doubt about it. I didn't know about the mathematical analysis of his paintings though, that's really cool. Thanks for the link.
We categorically did not gave up paints entirely. That's an ignorant and naive statement.
Of course not, and I was not implying that either. I was merely illustrating the influence of technology on artistic expression.
Case în point: silkscreen collages, to stay in the analog domain. Andy Warhol is widely recognised as an artistic genius these days. That wasn't the case iback then.
Andy Warhol was one of the most popular and famous artist of his era, while he was alive. He was considered such a genious that he threw parties with Hollywood stars and millionaires. What are you on about? Are you just willfully ignorant? repeating some AI hallucinations? Who fed you these lies?
You seem to mistake popularity for acceptance. Warhol was hugely controversial in his day, especially in the beginning of his career (the Campbell Soup expo?). Most great artists are controversial, because they tend to push the status quo until it shatters.
And tone down the ad hominem, this isn't reddit, we're just having a conversation about art.
Pollock stole the whole idea from an east bloc woman who did "pouring" already.
Also, the art world in the USA was heavily CIA sponsored in the 50/60 to counter USSR cultural influence.
In my personal opinion, pollocks work isn't worth the paint he poured. It's just based on the idea that if you're the first to do it, it's "revolutionary", which it was for the impressionists and before, but not very much beyond, IMO.
It also lead to money laundring, and eventually selling a banana scotched to a wall for hundreds of thousands of dollars. That is not art.
Rant off/ 😱
Hey, I have that banana duct taped in my living room! 🤣
Art is subjective, always has been. I remember visiting a modern art museum in Germany years ago, and seeing a weed growing at the base of the wall in one of the rooms. Looking closer, I could see the weed was a very lifelike bronze cast, but in that moment the juxtaposition was jarring enough to make me question what art really is. I doubt it will have the same effect on everyone, but for me that was significant. And memorable, as you can see.
Sure, but was it art?
The discussion is endless ofc :-)
BTW the taped banana comes with instructions on how to replace it when it goes old. I'm sure you are not doing it correctly!! /s
Hate is too strong of a word. AI art is sometimes freaky to look at, sometimes it's pretty. It is usually devoid of a certain intangible thing that you can get from human art, even shitty human art. But it's occasionally a fun toy too? I can't conjure up any strong feelings for AI images unto themselves.
I do have intense loathing for the capitalists who want to use that AI art to replace human work. And for the AI "Artists" who are enabling them by acting like this is the next evolution of art and anyone with concerns is just holding back "DA FUTER".
I also have concerns about the environmental/energy costs of AI -- Just in general. Not just AI Images or Chatbots or whatever. AI can be a good thing, a tool to help us. And even when it's useless, it's kinda fun to mess about with. But the energy and environmental costs of all that computing, especially the amount of it that is wasted because even if AI ultimately becomes a part of our lives, it is DEFINITELY a wasteful investment bubble right now -- THAT sucks. And THAT seems to have no obvious solution.
i'm utterly bored by it and annoyed that it mucks up all the places I'd usually steal images for my TTRPG games.
If I don't like a piece of art it's not because it was made using AI but because it's bad art. If it's good it's good no matter who or what made it.
What makes art good?
That’s entirely subjective. If I actually stop and look at it instead of just scrolling past, then there’s probably at least something good about it - to me. Someone else might still just scroll by.
Yeah, I know, I meant to you.
Don't know about "art", but I use it sometimes to generate contextual imagery for blog posts and videos. I would've never hired an artist so the only real difference is that it looks a lot better than when I used to try to draw something myself.
I art. I do love ai for the lulz, however, actual commercial art? Absolutely not. It's not an end product. It's fun, it's inspiring.
it's extremely obvious and always seems as if they could do it with a real artist, 3d modeller and or an actor for less than 1% their budget, so it's extremely trashy
On the other hand, because it's so low effort me being able to realise it is AI also makes me feel disgusted, Atleast spend effort prompting it so it doesn't look like shit, I swear, lazy bastards
For solo developers that use it for games or backgrounds, it's not that bad, and it's usually temporary.
Nice try. I'm not helping you improve your art algorithms for free. You need to pay some art teachers for feedback like that.
haha, i don't developing an algorithm related to AI. i was just asking because now, my people in my country are using AI to convert their pictures to Ghibli Studio's art style. just asking here people on Fedi about that.
I was playing. Thanks for your sincere response, though.
I'm not a fan of AI generated stills, but I've seen a number of AI generated music videos that are kind of fun to watch. It's not so much the art itself, but the way it collapses from hallucination to hallucination repeatedly that just goes well with some music I guess. Theres obviously still a lot of work from actual artists to make it into a video and time it with music, and the music itself of course is still human (afaik). Here's a few examples I've seen, I'd love to know what people think of this style specifically, as opposed to the AI slop photos we are getting bombarded with. Especially if you hate it, I want to hear about why!
Mormaid - Wet Summer
Probass Hardi - Polonyna
Elgrandetoto - Dinero
Die Antwoord - Age of Illusion
damn i haven't heard die antwoord for a long time
I'm not a fan of it as their are just certain details an AI can never do. A color here, a twist or turn there, a stroke this way, a drip in that place. It is something that one can't program to have AI even think to do. I do think AI has its place and is a good tool.
low effort crap is low effort crap no matter how it's made, that said, there is plenty of high quality, high effort AI art out there that has a lot of prompt engineering put into it; it is merely drowned out in a sea of sludge. It's just about as easy for someone to put in zero effort and churn out AI sludge as it is for them to scribble in MSPaint, the difference being scribbling in MSPaint usually has some level of charm to it for its simplicity. That doesn't mean the guy who spends a lot of time tweaking their prompt to get it exactly right isn't an artist, it means they create art with different tools. Whether you use a rattlecan and stencils, or pencils and paper, or paint and canvas, or a wacom tablet and stylus, or type in carefully crafted prompts, art is art is art is art. But if you don't spend the time required to get good at it, your art will be shit.
Also, watching the artist crowd melt down again saying "that's not real art!" is absolutely hilarious. Those who weren't around at the time may not remember, but when digital art was starting to become a thing, there were plenty of people who firmly attested that if it was digital, it wasn't "real" art. Watching the same set of creatives having the same meltdown ~30 years later, "REEEEE YOU CAN'T JUST USE TECHNOLOGY TO MAKE THE PROCESS EASIER", is extremely funny.
thanks for your response!
Like anything art generators are a tool. One that can be very useful in a creative process, to convey an idea that is hard to present in text, to explore variations on a concept without having to draw something a hundred times, etc. It would be very difficult to argue that something like that has no valid uses.
However, as it stands the majority of the tools in place cost a fair bit of money to set up and run and so there is a high barrier to entry, and so the profits made from running them end up going primarily to those who are rich enough to set them up in the first place. Wealth inequality is a massive issue right now and so this sours a lot of people against these tools.
Many people also subjectively dislike AI art, which is a fair comment, as all art is subjective, but I don't think it necessarily helps anyone to debate over whether it looks good or not, that shouldn't be the issue here.
You could argue that the root of the problem is that most users of these tools will never consider the repercussions of paying for them, the people they are supporting are obscured behind many layers and it is impossible for the average consumer to know what the recipient will do with those funds.
Like any tool, these machines have created a new way for the already powerful to exploit the weak, it may be abstracted away behind closed doors but it is happening.
You can get by with 4G of VRAM if all you want is to generate some pictures, or differently put every PC capable of 1080p gaming should do the trick. With good software (comfyui) you can do SDXL just fine, and almost crush SD1.
It's fine-tuning much less training models where things get expensive but there's other ways to get creative with those models. Training is only ever barely possible on gaming GPUs because those cap out at about 16G VRAM.
(Just for completeness' sake, for anyone wondering "why don't I just use my 32G worth of CPU RAM to supplement the VRAM?" -- that's already happening anyways. You need a minimum amount of VRAM or your box will be busier shuffling data from and to the GPU than it is actually doing calculations: Your GPU is going to thrash. If that happens it's probably faster to run the AI on the CPU and, well, it's just not build to run that kind of code).
yes, the answer would be subjective since art itself is subjective. thanks for your neutral point of views :)
AI “art” has made me realize how important part human behind art is to the point where I will never pay for any AI “art”. AI “art” is worthless and I would even say it devalues rest of the thing, if its part of some bigger whole like game for example. I do not want to see it, I dont want even glimpse. When I see AI “art”, its only a reminder to me of theft that has been done to make it happen and of some smarmy slimy techbro behind it. Whenever I see AI “art” only thing I feel is either sad or angry depending on day.
If I was religious type, Id even go as far as say I believe in soul now because how soulless AI “art” is.
I am fucking sick of it and deeply despise AI “art” in its entirety with every fiber of my being.
I am sure I will get downvoted to deepest depths by techbros and people who dont care and simply consume whatevers brought in front of them, use every AI filter they get their hands on. But hey, I was asked, I gave my answer.
thanks for your response!
They say imitation is the sincerest form of flattery.
I'm not exactly a visual artist who stands to lose something in this armsrace, but that's how I tend to look at it. As a software engineer I'm fascinated by the possibilities. There were people who despised the camera when it came to be. I firmly believe that once the AI hype dies down "real" human-made art will not have suffered any setback. At the end of the day this is still people building tools to imitate something worth imitating. Nothing is ever fully original.
If someone can't see the value in art that took actual human effort to make then that is on them. If a tool is built upon millions of existing pieces of human artistic effort to make it available to the general public I'd see this as less deplorable than copying a CD to a cassette tape in the 80s. If someone tried to make money by selling what is essentially other people's work then that is obviously a different story, no matter what is being misappropriated.
It's not art. Expanding the sense of the word to all kinds of nonsensical phenomena is both damaging art and artists as well.
I take the liberty of a personal definition of art, or if not definition, at least prerequisites for something to be considered art, and that is that art must be made by the hand of the artist and that it's conception must include deliberate thought/mental process of the artist. It may not be the best definition, but I consider it to be good enough to draw a definite line between Michelangelo and the internet lady who vlogs about the art of tying your shoelaces or some similar shit.
For me it's on the same level as memes - not intended to be consumed as art, but merely as a form of posting. It's trash and that's fine.
But it shouldn't be elevated above that. It's derivative and stilted and lacks character, and worse, it might be depriving amateur artists the chance to flex their creative muscles and actually create art themselves.
Also draining cities dry of municipal water to generate a picture of a bored ape is probably a bad use of resources.
Most of it reminds me of that tacky clip art that got bundled with word processors and Corel Draw in the 90s. It’s just all got this “uncanny valley” sheen to it.
I am fine with AI art as long as its properly credited to its creato. Not the person who wrote a prompt to generate the image, not the company that created the program. The AI should be credited in a way that no person could confuse it for something someone made
If thats too hard, banning AI art is also fine. I havent seen any real use for it
No, quite the opposite.
Honestly, I find the vast majority of the arguments against it to be be made from a point of ignorance, propagated by a rabid sub-set of artists looking to generate clicks for their sensationalist YouTube videos.
Some pertinent reading/watching:
https://youtu.be/gWmEXCJIIZ4
https://epoch.ai/gradient-updates/how-much-energy-does-chatgpt-use
https://www.nature.com/articles/s41598-024-54271-x
https://craigboehman.com/blog/in-defense-of-ai-art
https://www.fxhash.xyz/article/in-defense-of-ai-art
https://andymasley.substack.com/p/a-defense-of-ai-art
https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/how-did-you-do-on-the-ai-art-turing
https://i.redd.it/ch5wpbz7tkje1.jpeg
thanks for your opinion.
I like playing around with it myself but I never upload it I just keep it on my computer cuz it's neat so I don't get why anyone else would upload AI generated stuff online
Bad for artists, but for the environment, low quality, low effort, and the most annoying people in the world love it.
It looks so detached from reality.
I don't hate it. I think it's fun as a sort of moment by moment ( I want to see this ) and just generate it and enjoy the wackyness. It does leave a lot to be desired in terms of composition and polish. I also absolutely hate people representing it as their own work. I also really enjoy art produced by people. I think what people produce is still superior in lots of ways. People are often telling a story with their art, and that really comes through. Also I love knowing the amount of thought and effort has gone into a work it makes it that much more impressive. The art people produce is often strongly influenced by art trends, culture, and life experience which we connect to as humans and AI can't produce that because it has no concept of these things. Sure AI can replicate that but it's not the same as the interaction and conversation I have with a piece of art produced by a person that I know must have felt certain ways about their work when producing it.
The easy answer is: Yes, because it's mostly bad.
The Long answer is: Like everything in art and life, If you can set it in right context it could also work. If you cannot, it's just bland and bad in the classic artistic craftmanship standard and modern art and Action Art.
Same short answer but adding a bit to the long, it seems that they have a feel to it that I just do not enjoy.
Also art is transgresive and AI generated images are usually not.
I don't hate it, I think it has its uses, just like text generation. They're great for brainstorming ideas or quick unimportant stuff like RPG campaigns, so for example an in-game fake company logo or a poem to contain hints for the players.
However trying to use it for anything serious and final is stupid and dangerous. IMO any artist that had their art used to train a model should be able to claim royalties on anything created with that model, regardless of whether they can prove their art was used for the piece. And if the data used to train the model is not made public or can't be verified, then ANY artist can. Maybe just 1% of the profits direct or indirect of that art, so for example you used AI to generate part of an invitation for a party, 100 artists could start a lawsuit and take every single cent you earned from the party. After all you indirectly hired them, it's only fair they get paid, had you hired a single artist you could negotiate the price with them.
No, just see it as another medium . Extremely overhated
Tbf tho lotsa popular styles that show in AI art am indifferent towards (even dislike outright . Example : this's somehow even greater assault on the eyes than Alegria illustrations) , but that's bcus it's really hard to create (unique|distinctive) styles with current tech (source : tried developing style for >1 yr (find|combin)ing artist tags in furry models → (genn|tweak)ing ~20-30 training imgs Once satisfied → testing outputs of style LoRA trained with PixAI and result on merge models don't lꝏk like the training data at all . PAINFUL) and not criticism of genAI itself
No, I enjoy how it democratises image creation and allows me to create a vision in my head without training at art for years.
You're lazy and talentless, and you like how it allows you to steal the hard work and talent of others.
If it came from stealing actual artists' work then I hate it. If they somehow generated it using all fairly sourced data then I don't care. Still would prefer an actual artists work and I'd certainly never knowingly pay for something generated by AI.
If I see a obviously AI generated picture as a thumbnail on youtube, I immediately block that creator. If I hear those awful AI voices reading text, same. If you want to share something with the world, put some effort into it.
Use case seems to just be dicking around, and that is just not worth the resources we pour into it.
Hate is such a strong word. Some bad, some good.
Bad:
Good:
cool!
As someone pointed out, do you like ads ? Because AI content feel the same, it's annoying stuff I need to skip to access real content and on top of that it's an ecological disaster.
When I open an image or a page and realise it's AI, I feel the same as when I download a movie and it turns out I got a dot exe.
I like it quite a bit. Le chat mistral does a good job
I like it for fun, memes, silly stuff, and inspiration to create something original.
I hate it for professional use. It all looks the same. And the kind of person using it professionally is 100% insufferably annoying and also so uncreative that whatever literal slop they put on marketplaces for Easy Money just falls flat and only makes pocket change from kids who don't know any better. And the kids deserve better, actual media with nuance and depth, things they can learn from and remember later on in life, not shallow meaningless slop to get them to look at car and phone ads while exposing them to sex, gore, pregnancy, and other things they aren't ready for.
i personally second this. thanks.
I'm going to take a wide definition of the word 'art' here and apply it to all artistic methods.
Its not art. Art, almost by definition, partly reflects an emotional state the artist was in when creating the work. AI merely apes the output, not the necessary emotional connection. Its like the shitty music that used to play in lifts (elevators) in that it uses the output but is utterly soulless.
Its ethically way worse than piracy. If you pirate (for example) an ebook or music its more than likely because you want to escape DRM or some other type of controlling software designed to prevent you from actually having control over what you would otherwise have bought. LLM's steal not just that but the whole creative process. Its more than pirating a movie or track or book, its more akin to stealing the thought process from an artists mind and trying to replicate the process automatically.
It is, to me, just another example of making the whole of our international artistic culture a bland homogenized cesspit of crapness. Its capitalism's best way to profit from art as there's no one to pay. But we end of with ever decreasing quality. AI based art becomes like humanity in the matrix - used then liquidised to feed the next iteration.
And then there's also the environmental impact. The last thing the word needs right now is something else gobbling resources - especially when the end result is utter shit.
I don't consider it art either but not hating it since it offers you a different view on realism while trying to be realism. With silly results like pouring a mug of hot coffee out of the fingers 🤌, or carrying a shield backwards.
In my understanding, art is made of
creativity
craftsmanship
If one of them is lacking, then the outcome is either just a copy, or even a bad copy.
Current AI is lacking both.
So whenever anyone calls generated pictures "art", then you know something about that one.
Only word wrong here is 'current'. AI will never have creativity or craftmanship. It's impossible.
AI is just a fun toy. It can't make "art." There are CEOs out there fucking thirsty at the idea of a 59% unemployment rate because everyone else is cut out of their business, but AI can't do the job and they will learn that the hard way after fucking over a bunch of people.
Even the success stories seem skeptical. I use AI all the time at work to assist with coding, and beyond that I use it all the time for fun—my job is safe because AI is fucking awful at it.
So anyway I don't hate it per se, but I don't like it other than jokey shit. But I don't want to see it everywhere, either.
It is scary the amount of people in this thread that actually think art is defined by how it is made, and not the emotions and thoughts it elicits.
Yes. It can only exist through stealing the creative work of others.
Also, it looks terrible.
No problem with AI generated art itself. Mostly an issue with "AI artists"
I don't hate AI-created images. I hate the insane amounts of energy required for current AI models. I hate that it's the same rich assholes who control everything also controlling AI. I hate that they monopolize access to models trained on all our work. And I hate that it will be these rich assholes benefiting from humans being put out of work by AI. Because this will happen on some scale.
If it were free, I'd love AI. Because it allows people who aren't artists to create stuff. And lowering the barrier of entry on art is always good, in my opinion.
Have you heard about AI Horde? It's a cluster of volunteer workers generating text and images for everyone for free.
You get credits by contributing your GPU to generate for others, but you can use the service without credits (or even an account), credits are there just to determine your position in the queue.
You can try it out for example on HordeNG (disclaimer: I created the HordeNG frontend).