I judge art on the basis of three things:
The intent of the artist,
The context surrounding the art,
My own interpretation of the art
A stable diffusion model is not much more than a set of statistical functions executed over a large array of numbers. Therefore, the model cannot have intent.
The use of the model to generate images damages the environment, makes use of work made by artists who, by design, cannot be credited for said work, and no or very little artistic effort went into the generation. Therefore, the context is pretty loathesome.
The third point depends on the image, although I find that most images do not have much in the way of creativity or artistic direction, and come off as “bland”, “samey”, “wrong”. The fact that there is no intent makes it hard for me to read intent. Therefore, my interpretation is usually not very favourable.
These are my thoughts. I believe your ideas about art and how we should judge it (which is what you are prescribing) to be quite stupid, but you live your life however you want, I guess.
There is someone using the model and it’s their intent that matters. When looking at a photograph, you don’t consider the intent of the camera.
The context surrounding the art
The environmental damage is mostly due to our failure of an energy grid. In any case, you can run these at home with no real environmental impact. It’s also crazy to talk about the impact digital technology has and ignore the impact marble statues or even simple paint has. Same for ignoring things like collage when it comes to copyright issues. You simply aren’t being fair.
We can look at the context in terms of how easy it is which is actually fair. But that can varie a lot (as seen below) and shouldn’t be the defining factor.
My own interpretation of the art
You largely ignored this since it is essentially “the thoughts and emotions it envokes”. It is also arguably the most important.
We seem to mostly have the same line of thought except I actually judge the piece instead of letting my bias do it. And I don’t call people stupid.
I also think context and intent is largely missing and can only be guessed for most art we see, especially on the internet.
In any case, I invite you to view this, read their process and tell me how it has none of the things you mentioned.
I disagree with your points fundamentally, and I believe the difference is in how we interpret both art and the creation of art. I do not believe that a prompter is able to convey enough intent for it to count.
This could be compared to someone commisioning a drawing for, for example, a story. The story and direction they give, that would be the prompt or what lead to it, in this case, would display their intent. The drawing itself, however, would not display their artistic vision, but that of the artist they commissioned to draw it. Now, they might coördinate with said artist to get their visions to align as closely as possible, but as I said, models have no vision, and so none can be aligned with. You could ‘find’ an image generated by such a model that aligns with what you wish for, but there is no intent behind it.
The environmental damage is inherent to the technology, as matrix multiplications are inherently not very efficient, and any given model runs a lot of them. Running a model at home seems more efficient because you only generate for yourself, but if every user of diffusion where to do this, the cost would not be better.
I do not understand what you see in the video you sent me. It does not, to me, seem to carry a message. Sure, some of it’s imagery can be aesthetically pleasing, but I cannot interpret it as carrying any meaning.
Oh, and dw, I did not mean to call you stupid, I think the ideas about art you have specifically are stupid. That does not necessarily carry over to any other part of you.
Prompting can be quite involved, especially when you use techniques like ControlNet, img2img, and inpainting. In the video I linked, they used real footage of dancers and the rest is essentially very complicated post processing. There’s countless way to use AI generation and it can easily be blended with other mediums.
While typing a quick prompt and generating something in a few minutes might not qualify as art, dismissing the entire medium is shortsighted.
The environmental damages are there but you chose to ignore the environmental damages of every other form. Even using cloud computing pales in comparaison with the cost of shipping over brushes from China.
I see in the video the things you were asking for in your previous comment:
It has clear creative intent and objectives. Context wise, it weaves together multiple art forms in a complex, cohesive piece. It’s clearly pleasing and brings about an emotional response. It’s a strong example of how AI can be thoughtfully integrated into the creative process.
Having a message and meaning is just another goal post even more subjective then the last which is the real issue. You are gate keeping something so subjective, and calling any differing opinion stupid is brutally obnoxious.
Sure but I don’t think it should be the line between garbage and good. It can add value and push the overall piece, but that isn’t what the person is implying.
There are probably some really fine paper napkin art out there, and having it on a paper napkin most likely adds to it overall, but it’s different then saying all paper napkin pieces have more value then all generated images.
Some of us value authenticity. Plagiarism-powered hallucination engines have exactly none of that. The disturbed individual (or individuals) that painted the bathroom of my primary school with feces created something more artful than any AI slop could ever be.
Imagine arguing that flavor is what is important in a dish and not the type of knife used to cut the vegetables, and have someone respond he’d rather drink piss.
Its more like arguing a soulless robot should make your food built upon stolen recipes, not only are the recipes stolen but that robot cannot taste nor understand flavor. All it understands is the words of the recipes and sometimes not even that, it than needs to make new recipes without being able to taste it. Your food will taste as bland and souless as the robot who cannot taste it, even if it does taste good you’ll know its basically just a worse version based on stolen recipes.
I hate to be the one to break it to you, but a huge amount of the food that is eaten in the world is made by “robots”. It ain’t the Keebler Elves in those factories baking your vanilla sandwich cookies, that’s for sure.
Go watch any video on mass produced food and you’ll see that it is made by machines. Drinks are mixed, bottled and packed without any human intervention. You would have a hard time trying to find a dish that you eat that was not prepared in some part by soulless, tasteless machines.
AI are also still configured by humans, since they are the ones choosing which training data is used. So automatically generated art is still human art.
If AI art only used ethically-sourced data, there’d be a lot less objection to it.
I can say, for sure, that this isn’t true.
People still catch the exact same flak for using generative fill in Photoshop despite Adobe training their models on artwork with the explicit permissions (and compensation) of the artists involved in making the training data.
People treat every model like it has personally eaten ever drawing and macaroni painting that they’ve ever done.
Because if you use words that only have objective definitions then you can arbitrarily move your definition around if people come up with counter-examples.
It’s a way of creating an argument that means nothing and also can’t be argued against on Internet forums where there are no rules (unlike, say a debate stage or court room where you have to rationally prove your points).
Lapis lazuli? Maybe not, but lithium mines are a constant source of criticism for those reasons, and your simplification of the world to an either or scenario is incredibly disingenuous.
If you think that people like Da Vinci and Michaelangelo had nothing to say, then you know nothing about artists. Da Vinci hated the Pope who commissioned the Sistine Chapel so much that he painted him burning in Hell directly behind the altar. He was a gay man who had relationships with his apprentices and performed illegal autopsies on bodies to study the human anatomy during a time when it was considered descecrating the dead, which formed the foundation of modern medicine’s understanding of the human body.
You’re just making excuses so you feel better about stealing the labor of others.
No one is making excuses, I’m just pointing out the hipocrisy of saying that the art is less valid because of the tools used.
And yes, I believe a person who has an artistic idea but not the skills to represent it should be able to do it though AI, just writing a prompt doesn’t make it art just like drawing a sunflower very realistically doesn’t make it art. Is music less art because it’s made with a synth or in Ableton?
No one is making excuses, I’m just pointing out the hipocrisy of saying that the art is less valid because of the tools used.
Good thing that’s not something I said, then. So what you’re doing is arguing a point that nobody said in order to reframe the actual argument into something different. Making excuses to avoid confronting the actual argument.
And yes, I believe a person who has an artistic idea but not the skills to represent it should be able to do it though AI
So do I. But if you’re doing that with an LLM made by a company that’s using unethically sourced training data to avoid paying the artists who made the art used for training, then you’re buying into a system that exploits workers for your own convenience and that makes the art bad. AI slop isn’t just slop because of the quality. It’s also because it’s wage theft. People respect the shitty napkin drawing more because, regardless of the quality, it shows that you were willing to put in the effort without the fancy tools while also not committing a corporation in the process.
you’re buying into a system that exploits workers for your own convenience
The electronic device you used to make this post was also made by exploiting wage laborers for the benefit of capitalists. Yet, you found that device to be so convenient that you still bought and used it anyway. The same could be said for all of the other goods and services that you use.
Perhaps you should remove the beam from your eye before pointing out the splinter in anothers
Said electronic device is a requirement to hold a job in my country and ensure I don’t end up homeless. It’s the same as owning a car here. If you have neither a phone or a reliable form of transport (meaning a car in this public transit-less shithole of a country), getting and holding a job is incredibly difficult.
This is one of the reasons that the UN has considered access to the internet a basic human right as of the 2000s or so.
Owning a phone and using the orphan crushing machine to make funny pictures on the internet are not equal.
The point is that the system itself is the issue. Calling out specific reasons for that is fine if you do so to call attention to its presence as the bigger systemic threat. But debating if one effect of capitalism is worse than another effect ignores the fact that we should be focusing on capitalism as a whole
AI can be bad only because capitalism is bad. Address the root cause
It is true it is an exercise in futility to try to give it a strict definition, as well as being very subjective. Nice vid, it’s always fun to find quality youtubers I don’t know.
“I judge art on the basis of how it was made, not on its merit in terms of the emotions and thoughts it elicits from me”
I judge art on the basis of three things:
The intent of the artist,
The context surrounding the art,
My own interpretation of the art
A stable diffusion model is not much more than a set of statistical functions executed over a large array of numbers. Therefore, the model cannot have intent.
The use of the model to generate images damages the environment, makes use of work made by artists who, by design, cannot be credited for said work, and no or very little artistic effort went into the generation. Therefore, the context is pretty loathesome.
The third point depends on the image, although I find that most images do not have much in the way of creativity or artistic direction, and come off as “bland”, “samey”, “wrong”. The fact that there is no intent makes it hard for me to read intent. Therefore, my interpretation is usually not very favourable.
These are my thoughts. I believe your ideas about art and how we should judge it (which is what you are prescribing) to be quite stupid, but you live your life however you want, I guess.
There is someone using the model and it’s their intent that matters. When looking at a photograph, you don’t consider the intent of the camera.
The environmental damage is mostly due to our failure of an energy grid. In any case, you can run these at home with no real environmental impact. It’s also crazy to talk about the impact digital technology has and ignore the impact marble statues or even simple paint has. Same for ignoring things like collage when it comes to copyright issues. You simply aren’t being fair.
We can look at the context in terms of how easy it is which is actually fair. But that can varie a lot (as seen below) and shouldn’t be the defining factor.
You largely ignored this since it is essentially “the thoughts and emotions it envokes”. It is also arguably the most important.
We seem to mostly have the same line of thought except I actually judge the piece instead of letting my bias do it. And I don’t call people stupid.
I also think context and intent is largely missing and can only be guessed for most art we see, especially on the internet.
In any case, I invite you to view this, read their process and tell me how it has none of the things you mentioned.
https://makeitrad.xyz/project/etherea/
I disagree with your points fundamentally, and I believe the difference is in how we interpret both art and the creation of art. I do not believe that a prompter is able to convey enough intent for it to count.
This could be compared to someone commisioning a drawing for, for example, a story. The story and direction they give, that would be the prompt or what lead to it, in this case, would display their intent. The drawing itself, however, would not display their artistic vision, but that of the artist they commissioned to draw it. Now, they might coördinate with said artist to get their visions to align as closely as possible, but as I said, models have no vision, and so none can be aligned with. You could ‘find’ an image generated by such a model that aligns with what you wish for, but there is no intent behind it.
The environmental damage is inherent to the technology, as matrix multiplications are inherently not very efficient, and any given model runs a lot of them. Running a model at home seems more efficient because you only generate for yourself, but if every user of diffusion where to do this, the cost would not be better.
I do not understand what you see in the video you sent me. It does not, to me, seem to carry a message. Sure, some of it’s imagery can be aesthetically pleasing, but I cannot interpret it as carrying any meaning.
Oh, and dw, I did not mean to call you stupid, I think the ideas about art you have specifically are stupid. That does not necessarily carry over to any other part of you.
Prompting can be quite involved, especially when you use techniques like ControlNet, img2img, and inpainting. In the video I linked, they used real footage of dancers and the rest is essentially very complicated post processing. There’s countless way to use AI generation and it can easily be blended with other mediums.
While typing a quick prompt and generating something in a few minutes might not qualify as art, dismissing the entire medium is shortsighted.
The environmental damages are there but you chose to ignore the environmental damages of every other form. Even using cloud computing pales in comparaison with the cost of shipping over brushes from China.
I see in the video the things you were asking for in your previous comment:
It has clear creative intent and objectives. Context wise, it weaves together multiple art forms in a complex, cohesive piece. It’s clearly pleasing and brings about an emotional response. It’s a strong example of how AI can be thoughtfully integrated into the creative process.
Having a message and meaning is just another goal post even more subjective then the last which is the real issue. You are gate keeping something so subjective, and calling any differing opinion stupid is brutally obnoxious.
Is it not possible that how something is made also elicits emotions and thoughts?
Sure but I don’t think it should be the line between garbage and good. It can add value and push the overall piece, but that isn’t what the person is implying.
There are probably some really fine paper napkin art out there, and having it on a paper napkin most likely adds to it overall, but it’s different then saying all paper napkin pieces have more value then all generated images.
Some of us value authenticity. Plagiarism-powered hallucination engines have exactly none of that. The disturbed individual (or individuals) that painted the bathroom of my primary school with feces created something more artful than any AI slop could ever be.
Imagine arguing that flavor is what is important in a dish and not the type of knife used to cut the vegetables, and have someone respond he’d rather drink piss.
Its more like arguing a soulless robot should make your food built upon stolen recipes, not only are the recipes stolen but that robot cannot taste nor understand flavor. All it understands is the words of the recipes and sometimes not even that, it than needs to make new recipes without being able to taste it. Your food will taste as bland and souless as the robot who cannot taste it, even if it does taste good you’ll know its basically just a worse version based on stolen recipes.
I mean I eat food made by a robot basically every day and it’s pretty good.
I hate to be the one to break it to you, but a huge amount of the food that is eaten in the world is made by “robots”. It ain’t the Keebler Elves in those factories baking your vanilla sandwich cookies, that’s for sure.
Go watch any video on mass produced food and you’ll see that it is made by machines. Drinks are mixed, bottled and packed without any human intervention. You would have a hard time trying to find a dish that you eat that was not prepared in some part by soulless, tasteless machines.
Those robots were still configured by humans to produce a product the humans designed.The automatically produced food is still human food.
AI are also still configured by humans, since they are the ones choosing which training data is used. So automatically generated art is still human art.
what if the knife were made out of the skulls of infants
Then that is a fucked up knife, but doesn’t change anything about the dish.
The argument is: the dish requires the use of the fucked-up knife.
If AI art only used ethically-sourced data, there’d be a lot less objection to it.
I can say, for sure, that this isn’t true.
People still catch the exact same flak for using generative fill in Photoshop despite Adobe training their models on artwork with the explicit permissions (and compensation) of the artists involved in making the training data.
People treat every model like it has personally eaten ever drawing and macaroni painting that they’ve ever done.
Why does AI art have “no authenticity”?
Because if you use words that only have objective definitions then you can arbitrarily move your definition around if people come up with counter-examples.
It’s a way of creating an argument that means nothing and also can’t be argued against on Internet forums where there are no rules (unlike, say a debate stage or court room where you have to rationally prove your points).
“I find the ethics involved in the creation of something to be irrelevant.”
Never heard anyone arguing over the ethics of the mining of lapis lazuli, and i think slavery and human misery trump plagerism.
So if ethics define art then DaVinci, Michelangelo, etc are not artists
Lapis lazuli? Maybe not, but lithium mines are a constant source of criticism for those reasons, and your simplification of the world to an either or scenario is incredibly disingenuous.
If you think that people like Da Vinci and Michaelangelo had nothing to say, then you know nothing about artists. Da Vinci hated the Pope who commissioned the Sistine Chapel so much that he painted him burning in Hell directly behind the altar. He was a gay man who had relationships with his apprentices and performed illegal autopsies on bodies to study the human anatomy during a time when it was considered descecrating the dead, which formed the foundation of modern medicine’s understanding of the human body.
You’re just making excuses so you feel better about stealing the labor of others.
No one is making excuses, I’m just pointing out the hipocrisy of saying that the art is less valid because of the tools used.
And yes, I believe a person who has an artistic idea but not the skills to represent it should be able to do it though AI, just writing a prompt doesn’t make it art just like drawing a sunflower very realistically doesn’t make it art. Is music less art because it’s made with a synth or in Ableton?
Good thing that’s not something I said, then. So what you’re doing is arguing a point that nobody said in order to reframe the actual argument into something different. Making excuses to avoid confronting the actual argument.
So do I. But if you’re doing that with an LLM made by a company that’s using unethically sourced training data to avoid paying the artists who made the art used for training, then you’re buying into a system that exploits workers for your own convenience and that makes the art bad. AI slop isn’t just slop because of the quality. It’s also because it’s wage theft. People respect the shitty napkin drawing more because, regardless of the quality, it shows that you were willing to put in the effort without the fancy tools while also not committing a corporation in the process.
The electronic device you used to make this post was also made by exploiting wage laborers for the benefit of capitalists. Yet, you found that device to be so convenient that you still bought and used it anyway. The same could be said for all of the other goods and services that you use.
Perhaps you should remove the beam from your eye before pointing out the splinter in anothers
Said electronic device is a requirement to hold a job in my country and ensure I don’t end up homeless. It’s the same as owning a car here. If you have neither a phone or a reliable form of transport (meaning a car in this public transit-less shithole of a country), getting and holding a job is incredibly difficult.
This is one of the reasons that the UN has considered access to the internet a basic human right as of the 2000s or so.
Owning a phone and using the orphan crushing machine to make funny pictures on the internet are not equal.
The point is that the system itself is the issue. Calling out specific reasons for that is fine if you do so to call attention to its presence as the bigger systemic threat. But debating if one effect of capitalism is worse than another effect ignores the fact that we should be focusing on capitalism as a whole
AI can be bad only because capitalism is bad. Address the root cause
Tbh, this is a valid take, but it’s just as valid to judge art based on the experience of viewing it.
How not to define art
(You can take this as agreeing or disagreeing with you, or both)
It is true it is an exercise in futility to try to give it a strict definition, as well as being very subjective. Nice vid, it’s always fun to find quality youtubers I don’t know.