You must log in or # to comment.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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?
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.
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.
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?
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.
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!
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Are modern DJs musicians as compared to a classically trained cellist (sp?)? In my thoughts, not really.
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.
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.
