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khwarezm posted:Seeing all this AI art proliferation has got to be one of the most depressing things I've seen in my life, especially since so much of my life and social circle is centred around art and artists. Apologies for being such a drat doomer but the thought that the future is just going to be art itself, the most personal and human thing you can have, just turn into the product of unthinking algorithms spitting out facsimiles of the work of actual humans mashed from thousands of images on the internet while some Silicon Valley fucker creams himself over this being the future of humanity makes me genuinely want to live in a cave in the woods. The art is still being done by people. Computers haven't become sentient and decided to make their own art without us. All you're doing is complaining that people are making art the "wrong" way. Mashing buttons on midjourney is a fun way to waste an afternoon, but it's not like lazy art didn't exist before it. Plenty of people are making genuinely interesting and previously-impossible things with these new tools and people will continue to invest time and effort into making art long into the future. KillHour fucked around with this message at 15:40 on Oct 1, 2023 |
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Oct 1, 2023 15:35
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KillHour posted:The art is still being done by people. Computers haven't become sentient and decided to make their own art without us. All you're doing is complaining that people are making art the "wrong" way. You're correct, I drat well do think its being made the wrong way because there's no actual craft to it beyond typing into an image generator that will excrete a sterile but highly detailed image with limited human involvement, and which is openly just a product of a bunch of Silicon Valley tech bros who have open contempt for art and the process of making it and are more than happy that this will do immense damage to every creative industry out there. All the while scraping the data it needs to work from the work of actual people who of course are not being asked if they consent to this.
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Oct 1, 2023 15:42
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khwarezm posted:You're correct, I drat well do think its being made the wrong way because there's no actual craft to it beyond typing into an image generator that will excrete a sterile but highly detailed image with limited human involvement, and which is openly just a product of a bunch of Silicon Valley tech bros who have open contempt for art and the process of making it and are more than happy that this will do immense damage to every creative industry out there. All the while scraping the data it needs to work from the work of actual people who of course are not being asked if they consent to this. Prompt engineering is quite complex and if you just type something into a generator you won't get anything useful out of it.
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Oct 1, 2023 15:46
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Yeah a lot of people had strong opinions about digital and multimedia art too when that started becoming viable, like it somehow diminishes the work of people who had put a lot of effort into learning how to paint by hand. I've shown AI art generation to some of my friends as well as some younger cousins of mine, and the delight you can see in their eyes when they're able to take some idea in their head and make an interesting facsimile of it is valid enough to me. Not everyone has the blood, sweat, time, and $$ to put into painting, or hundreds of dollars to give to an artist for a commission, anytime a cool idea for an image pops in their head. The AI art is still just a crude facsimile if you have any kind of specific composition in mind.
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Oct 1, 2023 15:48
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khwarezm posted:You're correct, I drat well do think its being made the wrong way because there's no actual craft to it beyond typing into an image generator that will excrete a sterile but highly detailed image with limited human involvement, and which is openly just a product of a bunch of Silicon Valley tech bros who have open contempt for art and the process of making it and are more than happy that this will do immense damage to every creative industry out there. All the while scraping the data it needs to work from the work of actual people who of course are not being asked if they consent to this. This is literally what people said about photography. And then again with digital media. Didn't we already do this whole "meaningless" art thing with dadaists putting urinals and bananas on display? If you think there's "limited human involvement" I strongly encourage you to check out the AI art thread in GBS where many goons are spending enormous amounts of time tweaking and building pipelines and moving things between different tools (including more "traditional" digital tools like Photoshop) and even writing scripts and software to get the image (or video) in their brain onto the screen. Art is like a living organism. It will expand to fill all the space that exists for it. People will experiment with new things. That is the nature of people, and it is as fundamental as the need for art itself. There will always be new forms of art that question the old forms of art, but likewise there will always be people willing to pay for paint on a canvas. Mederlock posted:Not everyone has the blood, sweat, time, and $$ to put into painting, or hundreds of dollars to give to an artist for a commission, anytime a cool idea for an image pops in their head. The AI art is still just a crude facsimile if you have any kind of specific composition in mind. I disagree with this characterization. AI art isn't inherently a crude facsimile of traditional art. I mean, it is if you try to use it that way, but only in the same way that someone only putting an hour into learning to paint can only make a crude facsimile of a Monet. The real interesting stuff is coming from the people who are putting the, blood, sweat, time and $$ into pushing the boundaries of the medium. Ultimately, it's still a young medium though, so it is still early days. Think of Photoshop Phriday back in the 2000s. That's where we are with this stuff. KillHour fucked around with this message at 15:58 on Oct 1, 2023 |
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Oct 1, 2023 15:53
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BabyFur Denny posted:Prompt engineering is quite complex and if you just type something into a generator you won't get anything useful out of it. Just until DALL-E 3 comes out and makes it trivial via conversational prompting.
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Oct 1, 2023 15:57
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SaTaMaS posted:Just until DALL-E 3 comes out and makes it trivial via conversational prompting. I love this argument because the old complaint was that there isn't enough control over the details for it to truly be an expression of human ideas, but now the ability to say "make the hat blue and move the tree over a bit" suddenly makes it too trivial to be real art.
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Oct 1, 2023 16:01
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Mederlock posted:Yeah a lot of people had strong opinions about digital and multimedia art too when that started becoming viable, like it somehow diminishes the work of people who had put a lot of effort into learning how to paint by hand. I've shown AI art generation to some of my friends as well as some younger cousins of mine, and the delight you can see in their eyes when they're able to take some idea in their head and make an interesting facsimile of it is valid enough to me. Digital art is a stupid comparison because it was the difference between drawing a picture on a piece of paper or a tablet. All of the same elements of artistic expression that you would normally have still apply, this isn't the case with AI where the extent of it is fiddling around with the prompts and the machine behind it does the heavy lifting. Its such a dehumanized, alienated way of looking at art, as if the process of drawing something is the 'problem' that needs to be resolved by advanced technology as opposed to the entire drat reason art exists at all, I don't even say this as a good artist. The end of result of this seems obvious to me, and for all your talk about the 'delight you can see in their eyes' there's a very good reason that every even faintly creative person I know no matter the age or background has an immensely uneasy and negative reaction to this, its almost certainly going to make their lives much harder and make human work even more replaceable, do you think its a coincidence that so many large corporations, especially in entertainment, are gearing up towards heavily exploiting this at the cost of their own employees? Did you miss so many discussions around this during things like the SAG-AFTRA strike? What about the considerable controversies around how these algorithms get their data where they are drawing upon human work without the consent of those it uses? KillHour posted:This is literally what people said about photography. And then again with digital media. Didn't we already do this whole "meaningless" art thing with dadaists putting urinals and bananas on display? Reading the GBS thread is like the worst possible piece of advice to give, its one of those things that crystalized such a negative impression about AI art in my mind where it overwhelmingly creates images that hit a kind of uncanny valley concept of what 'good art' looks like and ultimately 90% of what is happening no matter how complex the prompts is the essential elements of creating art are exported to a machine that will overwhelmingly create mechanical, sterile art. From my vantage point its doing the opposite of encouraging experimentation, the reliance on algorithms just creates something that cannot produce anything new or interesting but instead is primarily about mashing together thousands of images it finds on the internet. The end point of this as far as I see it is that our already miserable corporatized treatment of art is going to get waaaaaaay worse as AI art is overwhelmingly used by corporate entities since its just cheaper to do, and that is absolutely going to hit the creative industries hard. I thought Corporate Memphis was bad, but based on things like the below tweet I suspect that I will be pining for that in 2030 when AI art absolutely dominates most of the images I see. https://twitter.com/ammaar/status/1707975011049635983
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Oct 1, 2023 16:17
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KillHour posted:I love this argument because the old complaint was that there isn't enough control over the details for it to truly be an expression of human ideas, but now the ability to say "make the hat blue and move the tree over a bit" suddenly makes it too trivial to be real art. I don't really care whether it's "real art", but this will hollow out the mid-tier art market that these models rely on for training data.
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Oct 1, 2023 17:11
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khwarezm posted:Digital art is a stupid comparison because it was the difference between drawing a picture on a piece of paper or a tablet. All of the same elements of artistic expression that you would normally have still apply, this isn't the case with AI where the extent of it is fiddling around with the prompts and the machine behind it does the heavy lifting. Its such a dehumanized, alienated way of looking at art, as if the process of drawing something is the 'problem' that needs to be resolved by advanced technology as opposed to the entire drat reason art exists at all, I don't even say this as a good artist. This isn't even remotely true. Drawing a picture on a tablet is nothing like drawing on paper. You have undo, you have color grading, you have advanced "brushes" that are more like tiny AI programs than they are like actual paint brushes. Photoshop is doing a HUGE amount of the traditional work involved in drawing. I'm not a good artist either, but I spent about 8 years learning to draw with charcoal, so I know at least a little about how much work (and practice) goes into just blending and cleaning up an edge that would take no time or skill at all in Photoshop. khwarezm posted:The end of result of this seems obvious to me, and for all your talk about the 'delight you can see in their eyes' there's a very good reason that every even faintly creative person I know no matter the age or background has an immensely uneasy and negative reaction to this, its almost certainly going to make their lives much harder and make human work even more replaceable, do you think its a coincidence that so many large corporations, especially in entertainment, are gearing up towards heavily exploiting this at the cost of their own employees? Did you miss so many discussions around this during things like the SAG-AFTRA strike? What about the considerable controversies around how these algorithms get their data where they are drawing upon human work without the consent of those it uses? Good to know that I'm not even faintly creative and I just want this to succeed because I'm a soulless corporation trying to eat my own tail. I'm interested in this because I've ALWAYS been interested in procedural art. I was into the demo scene in the early 2000s, and I remember playing around with .werkkzeug back in the day. I still make digital procedural art and the tools to create it, and let me tell you, it's a LOT of work. Like years and years of work. (Epilepsy warning) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1XBgs5xijXg https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TBzt5f8fHCc https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VyZOetFApAc Yes, there are arguments happening all over the place about how to "ethically" train an AI. I have opinions(TM) on this, but it's completely tangential to the argument of whether AI art is art and whether the techniques themselves add to or subtract from the experience of art. Those are the kind of details that will inevitably get resolved in some way by lawyers and money, and it won't be a situation that makes everyone happy but it's something we will eventually move on from. khwarezm posted:Reading the GBS thread is like the worst possible piece of advice to give, its one of those things that crystalized such a negative impression about AI art in my mind where it overwhelmingly creates images that hit a kind of uncanny valley concept of what 'good art' looks like and ultimately 90% of what is happening no matter how complex the prompts is the essential elements of creating art are exported to a machine that will overwhelmingly create mechanical, sterile art. From my vantage point its doing the opposite of encouraging experimentation, the reliance on algorithms just creates something that cannot produce anything new or interesting but instead is primarily about mashing together thousands of images it finds on the internet. I don't know what thread you're reading, but a lot of posters in there are putting dozens or hundreds of hours of work into their projects. This person is on a mission to make a TV show: https://forums.somethingawful.com/showthread.php?threadid=4000251&userid=29808&perpage=40&pagenumber=5#post533929000 This person is doing insane things with complicated workflows: https://forums.somethingawful.com/showthread.php?noseen=0&threadid=4000251&pagenumber=339&perpage=40#post533674400 Here's the "prompt" (workflow) for that image. You can see how much control and tweaking is really involved here: https://pastebin.com/178xbGhM Sure, there are tons of people making the equivalent of stick figures, but everyone starts making stick figures. That's how art works. khwarezm posted:The end point of this as far as I see it is that our already miserable corporatized treatment of art is going to get waaaaaaay worse as AI art is overwhelmingly used by corporate entities since its just cheaper to do, and that is absolutely going to hit the creative industries hard. I thought Corporate Memphis was bad, but based on things like the below tweet I suspect that I will be pining for that in 2030 when AI art absolutely dominates most of the images I see. You're projecting the problems of unconstrained capitalism onto whatever the latest art thing happens to be. The comic book example is incredibly ironic. When comic books first became popular, they weren't even considered art - there was a huge push to ban them! Comic books were made cheaply and with little regard for artistic quality, often just to sell advertising space to gullible kids. The idea of old Batman comics being pieces of art comes from a combination of a few decent artists standing out in the absolute tidal wave of poo poo, and nostalgia driving the purchase and preservation of things literally designed to be thrown away each month. This is not a new problem and AI isn't causing it. KillHour fucked around with this message at 17:39 on Oct 1, 2023 |
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Oct 1, 2023 17:14
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khwarezm posted:Digital art is a stupid comparison because it was the difference between drawing a picture on a piece of paper or a tablet. All of the same elements of artistic expression that you would normally have still apply, this isn't the case with AI where the extent of it is fiddling around with the prompts and the machine behind it does the heavy lifting. Its such a dehumanized, alienated way of looking at art, as if the process of drawing something is the 'problem' that needs to be resolved by advanced technology as opposed to the entire drat reason art exists at all, I don't even say this as a good artist. Art can be described as the expression of creative skill and imagination but isn't the important part of that equation "expression of imagination"? Hypothetically, if we created tools that eliminated the need for any skill wouldn't that increase expression of imagination, ideas, emotion etc which is the whole point. Should skill be a barrier to expression and if so, why? khwarezm posted:Reading the GBS thread is like the worst possible piece of advice to give, its one of those things that crystalized such a negative impression about AI art in my mind where it overwhelmingly creates images that hit a kind of uncanny valley concept of what 'good art' looks like and ultimately 90% of what is happening no matter how complex the prompts is the essential elements of creating art are exported to a machine that will overwhelmingly create mechanical, sterile art. From my vantage point its doing the opposite of encouraging experimentation, the reliance on algorithms just creates something that cannot produce anything new or interesting but instead is primarily about mashing together thousands of images it finds on the internet. My question would be why mechanical sterile art would come to dominate most of the images you see? If most of the images you see are from corporate sources that control the creative output of artists then has anything of value been lost? If most of the images you see are from independent artists freely expressing their imagination in creative and original ways then how were they replaced by mechanical steril AI art?
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Oct 1, 2023 17:16
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Owling Howl posted:Art can be described as the expression of creative skill and imagination but isn't the important part of that equation "expression of imagination"? Hypothetically, if we created tools that eliminated the need for any skill wouldn't that increase expression of imagination, ideas, emotion etc which is the whole point. Should skill be a barrier to expression and if so, why? Art doesn't require imagination. You can just create... just channel thoughtless id into a medium, and be as surprised by the result as anyone else.
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Oct 1, 2023 17:46
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We're going to need an early Butlerian Jihad.
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Oct 1, 2023 18:09
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Bel Shazar posted:Art doesn't require imagination. You can just create... just channel thoughtless id into a medium, and be as surprised by the result as anyone else. That's still from your imagination, even if it's from the more unconscious part of it. Hell, none of us have free will anyways 
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Oct 1, 2023 18:26
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They did it. They finally made the AI capable of producing true Art. I am trembling in terror and joy of its awesomeness.
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Oct 1, 2023 19:19
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KillHour posted:This isn't even remotely true. Drawing a picture on a tablet is nothing like drawing on paper. You have undo, you have color grading, you have advanced "brushes" that are more like tiny AI programs than they are like actual paint brushes. Photoshop is doing a HUGE amount of the traditional work involved in drawing. I'm not a good artist either, but I spent about 8 years learning to draw with charcoal, so I know at least a little about how much work (and practice) goes into just blending and cleaning up an edge that would take no time or skill at all in Photoshop. The same does not apply with AI art, we can dance around the topic but fundamentally its about offloading as much of these elements of creating art that people have dealt with for literal tens of thousands of years onto a computer algorithm, at which point its about trying to jostle with the programme until it creates what you want. Even if I liked AI art I'd still recognize that's fundamentally just not the same as the difference between drawing on a tablet and drawing on paper. quote:Good to know that I'm not even faintly creative and I just want this to succeed because I'm a soulless corporation trying to eat my own tail. I'm interested in this because I've ALWAYS been interested in procedural art. I was into the demo scene in the early 2000s, and I remember playing around with .werkkzeug back in the day. I still make digital procedural art and the tools to create it, and let me tell you, it's a LOT of work. Like years and years of work. quote:I don't know what thread you're reading, but a lot of posters in there are putting dozens or hundreds of hours of work into their projects. Nowadays when I look at images like that I know that this will just lead to things like vastly slashing the amount of people employed in basic creative industries, there's endless amounts of images that I can see which could be easily subbed in for illustrations for magazines, or advertisements, and I can guarantee that this is rapidly gearing towards things like concept art in things like videogames or movies, or perhaps even animation. I am absolutely not looking forward to the effects of this in the slightest when I know that most entertainment companies are chomping at the bit at the prospect that they can lay off most of their art departments in a given project and replace with a few guys using Dall E or a similar programme producing works even more sterile than they were previously. quote:You're projecting the problems of unconstrained capitalism onto whatever the latest art thing happens to be. The comic book example is incredibly ironic. When comic books first became popular, they weren't even considered art - there was a huge push to ban them! Comic books were made cheaply and with little regard for artistic quality, often just to sell advertising space to gullible kids. The idea of old Batman comics being pieces of art comes from a combination of a few decent artists standing out in the absolute tidal wave of poo poo, and nostalgia driving the purchase and preservation of things literally designed to be thrown away each month. This is not a new problem and AI isn't causing it. I am absolutely justified in projecting the problems of unconstrained capitalism onto the latest art thing because these capitalists are intimately involved in its creation and have built the entire technological scaffolding around their systems that dominate the internet and tech industry and the issues that will bring with them, I've already touched on the deeply difficult issue about things like images that are being harvested as reference for the algorithm to use whether or not this is anything any of the artists behind them sign off on. In addition to the deep problems this will create around the entire art industry as it operates in our current capitalist systems. Being frank, I don't really care about some people's opinions on comic books in the 30s because I think they were self evidently full of poo poo, drawing comic books necessitated bringing in large amounts of creative people who honed their skills and expressed their art in unique ways, in contrast AI art will probably start to cut into the comic book industry and make the artists more replaceable if they can be gotten rid of and replaced with a lot less people who are mostly tweaking image generators, maybe at best touching up the images they produced by more traditional means. This is what I mean when I talk about alienation, people become more removed from the process of creating these products and accordingly more disposable. You're free to disagree but even the miserable American comic book industry produced people like Jack Kirby, I think AI will make producing people like that a lot more unlikely. Owling Howl posted:Art can be described as the expression of creative skill and imagination but isn't the important part of that equation "expression of imagination"? Hypothetically, if we created tools that eliminated the need for any skill wouldn't that increase expression of imagination, ideas, emotion etc which is the whole point. Should skill be a barrier to expression and if so, why? quote:My question would be why mechanical sterile art would come to dominate most of the images you see? If most of the images you see are from corporate sources that control the creative output of artists then has anything of value been lost? If most of the images you see are from independent artists freely expressing their imagination in creative and original ways then how were they replaced by mechanical steril AI art? Call me old fashioned, but I think that its fallacious to assume that because the current system is less than ideal for the organic expression of art through corporate capitalism, that it doesn't really matter if it gets worse. Even corporate art I think has created a lot of work of genuine value because it still required a lot of human engagement, the likes of Norman Rockwell, J. C. Leyendecker or Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec did a lot of commercial art that I think is top class. I already expressed my contempt towards things like Corporate Memphis that's become the generic corporate style worldwide in the last decade, but if its a choice between that, and commercial artists as an occupation becoming much more precarious and the resulting art becoming even more sterilized and alienated I'll take all the giant hands, tiny heads and flat colours in the world. Basically, its a process of corporatization of art that's going to get worse as they can increasingly remove the human engagement that produces art in the first place and replace with technological automation. khwarezm fucked around with this message at 20:01 on Oct 1, 2023 |
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Oct 1, 2023 19:27
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khwarezm posted:... just turn into the product of unthinking algorithms spitting out facsimiles of the work of actual humans mashed from thousands of images on the internet while some Silicon Valley fucker creams himself over this being the future of humanity makes me genuinely want to live in a cave in the woods. Take it all the way back to where it started: cave paintings
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Oct 1, 2023 19:57
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khwarezm posted:What you're describing is the difference between the mediums used to make a picture, but you know full well that the basic principles of things like understanding of anatomy, or perspective, will still apply whether or not somebody is doing an oil painting, charcoal drawing or a Mezzotint. In that regard, how is Photoshop that much of a departure from traditional forms or art? It doesn't produce the image for you by default, it requires the artist to actually engage with it in the same way they would with previous methods, I know myself, and from so many people that I live and work with, that the skill set that you get from working doing digital illustration and regular illustration are extremely interchangeable. I completely and fundamentally disagree with your description. A complete non-artist knows what a face looks like and can distinguish a face that doesn't "look right" from one that does. Being able to translate human anatomy into the mechanical movements of outlines is a physical skill that requires a lot of study, but has nothing to do with creativity. Someone saying that needing to know how to work with real paint is necessary to do art has just as much of a valid argument as you saying that you need to know how to outline a human figure to do art - that is to say, you are both wrong. khwarezm posted:Look man good for you that you've found some satisfaction in the work you've put in this, but its a position that's a far cry from the people I know and have worked and studied with who can see what's coming down the road and understandably they are absolutely terrified. It astonishes me that you are so cavalier when these issues will get incredibly heated in a very short amount of time, and from the way things have always gone are almost certainly going to be extremely damaging to them and their livelihoods when large corporations are inevitably going to have a very, very strong vested interest in resolving things in a very particular way, we are absolutely not going to simply move on from any of these issues anytime soon, frankly we haven't really simply moved on from most disruptive technology in the last 200 years. Those people are experiencing economic problems, not art problems. The solutions to those problems are to fight for economic equality and strong safety nets, not to decide that nothing is ever allowed to change to protect the monetary value of their skills. I'm for unions protecting the value of time and labor and safe working conditions. I'm against unions fighting against the tidal changes of technology and screaming about drowning. Stop standing still in the drat water! I'm sorry, but SAG is wrong about this (not everything - their arguments about streaming royalties are correct). khwarezm posted:In the nicest way possible, the pieces you're posting doesn't really change my view on the quality of AI art, I've read that thread quite extensively, I've kept up with the big things as the technology has developed and seen thousands and thousands of the images that have been generated across SA, Reddit, Twitter etc and overwhelmingly it just solidifies my view that AI overwhelmingly creates what I said earlier, an uncanny valley concept of what good art is. I'm sorry you don't see the value in it, but there's a ton of effort in it and a lot of people who do. You still have to respect that even if you personally don't like the results. khwarezm posted:Nowadays when I look at images like that I know that this will just lead to things like vastly slashing the amount of people employed in basic creative industries, there's endless amounts of images that I can see which could be easily subbed in for illustrations for magazines, or advertisements, and I can guarantee that this is rapidly gearing towards things like concept art in things like videogames or movies, or perhaps even animation. I am absolutely not looking forward to the effects of this in the slightest when I know that most entertainment companies are chomping at the bit at the prospect that they can lay off most of their art departments in a given project and replace with a few guys using Dall E or a similar programme producing works even more sterile than they were previously. Things you make on contract for money are not art. They are a job you do for money. You might have some kind of minimal artistic control over the output, but that's just as true of a PowerPoint presentation I make about some project. Does that make my PowerPoint art? Of course not. By contrast, if I am internally motivated to press a button over and over for the sake of what interesting thing might come out, that output is more art than a commissioned illustration, even if it was drawn by the best artist. If you are paid by someone else to make a thing that they want, you are not making art. You are delivering on a contract. They are the ones making the art, because they are deciding what should be made and how, and executing on that. In the same way, if I tell a machine to make a thing, the machine isn't making art. I am making art by directing the thing to be made. Whether the machine should be a human paid for their efforts instead is purely an economic question, not an artistic one. KillHour fucked around with this message at 20:08 on Oct 1, 2023 |
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Oct 1, 2023 20:03
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So far the most profound thing to me about using chatgpt a lot for indie game development is that it dramatically reduces the amount of time I have to spend reinventing the wheel. GPT makes a lot less off-by-one errors than me too.
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Oct 1, 2023 20:22
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KillHour posted:If you are paid by someone else to make a thing that they want, you are not making art. You are delivering on a contract. They are the ones making the art, because they are deciding what should be made and how, and executing on that. What? Some of the most famous paintings were commissioned, including Mona Lisa.
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Oct 1, 2023 20:50
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Uncanniness is part of the charm for many people. A subject who doesn't know how to hold a spoon correctly makes the image more interesting, not less.
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Oct 1, 2023 20:58
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Doctor Malaver posted:What? Some of the most famous paintings were commissioned, including Mona Lisa. This is very true and will continue to be true. Something isn't disqualified as art because it was done for money. e: though this minor part doesn't disqualify the rest of op's argument Count Roland fucked around with this message at 21:43 on Oct 1, 2023 |
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Oct 1, 2023 21:38
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I know at least two independent artists who have trained LoRAs to help them with commission work, using the output trained on their previous works to generate pose, blocking and colour ideas that they can composite in photoshop and trace over. They, of course, would never openly talk about this within their own artist circles or announce it on social media because the temperature of conversation about this kind of poo poo is so high that they know it would just create problems. These aren't grifters, when talking to them they share a lot of the same concerns about exploitation of AI, but they do find it useful. It's made me question just how unified the artist community is towards the rejection of AI art tools. SCheeseman fucked around with this message at 23:34 on Oct 1, 2023 |
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Oct 1, 2023 23:28
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If anything we probably need more art patronage. I'm not sure how wealth inequality now compares to Renaissance Italy, but the wealthy now seem like they're only concerned with growing wealth, not spending it.
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Oct 1, 2023 23:51
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KillHour posted:I completely and fundamentally disagree with your description. A complete non-artist knows what a face looks like and can distinguish a face that doesn't "look right" from one that does. Being able to translate human anatomy into the mechanical movements of outlines is a physical skill that requires a lot of study, but has nothing to do with creativity. Someone saying that needing to know how to work with real paint is necessary to do art has just as much of a valid argument as you saying that you need to know how to outline a human figure to do art - that is to say, you are both wrong. Frankly in this conversation I've been trying to avoid getting sucked into debates about the nature of art or whether or not AI art actually does count as art, but I have been pretty consistent about still using the term AI art. Honestly I use an extremely broad definition of art, my issue with AI art is that I really do think it cheapens and degrades the very idea of art and alienates it from human interaction to make it an increasingly automated process with less and less need for personal input, and worse, it will almost certainly have a very damaging effect on people who want to make creative endeavours their way of making their living. quote:Those people are experiencing economic problems, not art problems. The solutions to those problems are to fight for economic equality and strong safety nets, not to decide that nothing is ever allowed to change to protect the monetary value of their skills. I'm for unions protecting the value of time and labor and safe working conditions. I'm against unions fighting against the tidal changes of technology and screaming about drowning. Stop standing still in the drat water! I'm sorry, but SAG is wrong about this (not everything - their arguments about streaming royalties are correct). quote:Things you make on contract for money are not art. They are a job you do for money. You might have some kind of minimal artistic control over the output, but that's just as true of a PowerPoint presentation I make about some project. Does that make my PowerPoint art? Of course not. By contrast, if I am internally motivated to press a button over and over for the sake of what interesting thing might come out, that output is more art than a commissioned illustration, even if it was drawn by the best artist.
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Oct 1, 2023 23:54
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Doctor Malaver posted:What? Some of the most famous paintings were commissioned, including Mona Lisa. I'm not saying that the final result isn't art. I'm saying the person painting it wasn't making art, they were collecting a paycheck. The person commissioning the piece might be making art, and their choice of painter surely factors into the objective qualities of the end result, but I do not see a distinction between someone being paid to paint a portrait and someone being paid to create a spreadsheet, except that the person commissioning the portrait is doing so for the purpose of making art and the person commissioning the spreadsheet probably isn't. Either way, the commissioner had the idea, the inspiration, the determination to make a thing for the purpose of art. They just chose to use money as the mechanism to produce it. In the same way, someone typing out a prompt in Dall-e is choosing to use a specific tool to make the thing in their head. As much as we don't want to think about it this way, in a capitalist society, people are tools and are used as such. The people mad at generative AI art aren't mad that more people can make art, per-se. They're mad that their value as a tool is diminished in the market. khwarezm posted:I mean... no, its as simple as saying Velazquez painted the portrait of pope Innocent X because he was paid to do so. I'm pretty confidant in saying the overwhelming majority of the greatest art in human history were produced because somebody paid someone else to do a piece on something specific they wanted. And yet, we understand that the painting is ultimately the creative work of Velazquez, and not Innocent, for me that creates a big question mark about AI. I think our problem is I disagree with you - Innocent is the creative mind behind the portrait because he could have said "no, do it again." This is not to diminish the value of Velazquez' work - Innocent could never have done it himself. But you can be very skilled at your job and still not make art. I have no idea why (some) artists insist that their job is somehow more human or intrinsically meaningful than that of a carpenter or a pilot or a programmer. When we celebrate commissioned works, we celebrate the skill of the painter. But you can write beautiful code or beautifully clean a bathroom if you are skilled in doing so. Neither of those are generally considered "art." khwarezm posted:Honestly I use an extremely broad definition of art, my issue with AI art is that I really do think it cheapens and degrades the very idea of art and alienates it from human interaction to make it an increasingly automated process with less and less need for personal input, and worse, it will almost certainly have a very damaging effect on people who want to make creative endeavours their way of making their living. This is a combination of personal opinion and unfalsifiable (since it predicts the future), but all I can really say is I think it will have a damaging effect on current people who want to make their current creative endeavours their way of making a living without changing anything about the way they work. But the next generation will find ways to be creative with the new tools and the extra time they save will be put towards new ways of expression that would have either been too labor intensive or just impossible. Am I right and you wrong? Are we both right to different degrees? Are we both wrong? Who knows - it's the future and we can't predict it. I understand that you are worried about it, and I can relate to that, but I still think this falls squarely on the "overall positive for humanity" line. khwarezm posted:On some level, I guess I am an old man yelling at the world as it changes, but I kind of don't care that much at this point, its one thing to wonder about how this would all pan out in a society without capitalism, but we don't live in that society and as things stand the AI art movement is overwhelmingly being driven by some of the largest and most entrenched companies on earth. It is an art problem when the economic problem damages and intrudes on artists, degrades their ability to make a living, and makes art itself something increasingly more and more informed by computer algorithms rather than human creativity. "Progress" isn't some neutral force that just passively happens and everybody should just shrug and deal with it, in our society its overwhelmingly driven by very un-neutral forces which have massive influence on how everyone experiences it. The whole thing gives me a bit more of appreciation when people express concern that technological innovation will damage their lifestyles and economic foothold in society, and its particularly galling that this is something that's not really a crucial part of people's wellbeing in the same way that cheap clothes might have been 200 years ago but its still come under threat of such an intense degree of automation. I watched a youtube video about this yesterday that had a good line that we automate art instead of all the jobs everyone hate. In the same breath you're saying we can't change the economic policy we currently have [because it is old] but we can restrict this new thing that could upset it [because it is new]. Yes, that's very much old man yelling at the world. You're focusing on the symptom, not the disease. KillHour fucked around with this message at 00:10 on Oct 2, 2023 |
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Oct 1, 2023 23:54
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A commissioner isn't necessarily an artist, there isn't much creative decision making involved in telling a painter to paint a portrait of themselves or someone, but if the commissioner brings narrative, characters and other ideas it becomes clearer cut.
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Oct 2, 2023 00:07
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SCheeseman posted:A commissioner isn't necessarily an artist, there isn't much creative decision making involved in telling a painter to paint a portrait of themselves or someone, but if the commissioner brings narrative, characters and other ideas it becomes clearer cut. This is getting into a question of "Is art defined by the whole or the parts." In other words, is it making something for the purpose of appreciating it as art that makes something art, or is it the creative decisions that go into the execution itself that makes something art? I'm more a fan of the former, because we consume art as a whole. Sure, the pieces might make a difference of how we experience it or if we think it's good or not, but hanging a painting in a gallery where people can see it vs throwing it in the garbage is probably the single most important act in terms of people actually experiencing the art at all. If it's the latter, why isn't a particularly clever bit of code art? There is a lot of creative decision making involved in that kind of thing, but it's not considered art because nobody framed it and hung it on a wall. If they did, it would become art and that would be because of the person who had the idea to frame it and hang it, not because of the person who wrote it in the first place.
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Oct 2, 2023 00:17
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KillHour posted:I'm saying the person painting it wasn't making art, they were collecting a paycheck. KillHour posted:In other words, is it making something for the purpose of appreciating it as art that makes something art, or is it the creative decisions that go into the execution itself that makes something art? This, this right here, this is the core, laid bare. An utter disregard - nay, open contempt! - for any notion of process. Complete disconnection from the material reality of creation; capitalist wet-dreams, unbound from the weight of labour. Elevating the "ideas guy" while turning the artist into mere "mechanism." AI art is art, by definition, yes; for good or bad it is impossible to create a definition of art that neatly excludes machine generated images alone. There's even a process! That's part of what makes it art by definition. But that's not the argument you're making here. You've decided that process can be discarded.
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Oct 2, 2023 01:35
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I think that just as we're not going out to pick up sticks to make a fire to cook food, we're not using analogue media to create posters manually for some company, and with AI, we will not make the 26th Avengers movie using concept artists that had the same art courses, doing the same matte paintings to create the same style that every triple A studio wants. AI will certainly kill alot of creative jobs in the short run but once it matures and evolves, I'm certain that it will create new ways of creative expression and people with a deep creative knowledge will probably be the ones that can use the tech in the most creative ways.
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Oct 2, 2023 01:38
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KillHour posted:I think our problem is I disagree with you - Innocent is the creative mind behind the portrait because he could have said "no, do it again." This is not to diminish the value of Velazquez' work - Innocent could never have done it himself. But you can be very skilled at your job and still not make art. I have no idea why (some) artists insist that their job is somehow more human or intrinsically meaningful than that of a carpenter or a pilot or a programmer. I'm mostly talking about this all in the context of art for two reasons, the first is that its just what I know best, I imagine that programming is a kind of an art form in itself from what I've heard about people like Chris Sawyer but I just don't have the experience. Second, ultimately art is a luxury, but a very special one, its not really necessary in a true sense in the way that its absolutely necessary that you want an airline pilot who won't crash into the side of a mountain, so there's something particularly galling and unpleasant for myself and many others that its art of all things that's probably going eaten up by the process of automatization. Also yes I think carpentry is very much artistry, but it has more practical uses that painting a picture so a lot of people often don't treat that way, when they should. quote:This is a combination of personal opinion and unfalsifiable (since it predicts the future), but all I can really say is I think it will have a damaging effect on current people who want to make their current creative endeavours their way of making a living without changing anything about the way they work. But the next generation will find ways to be creative with the new tools and the extra time they save will be put towards new ways of expression that would have either been too labor intensive or just impossible. I think that using AI to make art is a fundamentally flawed way of approaching it because its limiting the actual control that a person has over the product and ultimately makes it wrangling a computer programme, in terms of general artistic expression I think using your own hands on your medium of choice will always be far superior, but that will get increasingly submerged by the brutal economic realities that elevates AI art and diminishes human made art. Whatever, as I said if I'm just railing against modernity then so be it. quote:In the same breath you're saying we can't change the economic policy we currently have [because it is old] but we can restrict this new thing that could upset it [because it is new]. Yes, that's very much old man yelling at the world. You're focusing on the symptom, not the disease.
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Oct 2, 2023 01:41
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Hungry posted:This, this right here, this is the core, laid bare. An utter disregard - nay, open contempt! - for any notion of process. Complete disconnection from the material reality of creation; capitalist wet-dreams, unbound from the weight of labour. Elevating the "ideas guy" while turning the artist into mere "mechanism." No, that's not it. I'm not saying that process can be discarded. Process can be incredibly important to a piece of art - it's often what defines the art itself. Piss Christ wouldn't be the same piece if it was made with orange food coloring. But the thing is that process itself is inherently an artistic decision, and there is no "correct" or "better" process. it's an objective, descriptive thing. Process is the thing that is done to make the art physical, but it is not what drives the art. A huge part of art is deciding what part of the process is important, and also what isn't important. This includes what to control and what to give up control over. You can't control every atom of paint on a canvas, so you need to determine what level of control will achieve the thing you want. Hiring another person to do part or all of the work is an artistic decision to give up a certain amount of control over the process in service to the art. This is true of portraits, but it's also true of composite works like movies and video games. Even the most micro-managey director can't control absolutely everything - so part of the art is deciding what process matters and what doesn't. Sometimes, you intentionally give up control as part of the art itself - Jackson Pollock is my go to example for this. The entire point of his paintings hinges on not having direct control over them. It was important to that art that the process be imprecise. AI generation falls on a continuum somewhere between drawing it yourself and commissioning a piece. An AI will never get annoyed that I wanted 300 revisions of something, but a commissioned artist might have an eye for composition that means it only needs 3 revisions anyways. Either will probably give a very different result with different tradeoffs. Which is better? Neither really - it's up to the person who wants the art to be made. It's their art, after all. I don't object to someone saying "I'm only interested in art that is drawn" in the same way I don't object to someone saying "I only like jazz music." Procedurally generated art might just not be interesting to someone who studies drawing in the same way electronic music might not be interesting to someone who studies playing live instruments. But while process is important, it's only important in the context of the result - was the process in service of the art? It's inherently subserviant. If AI art gets you closer to the thing you want to make, use it. If it detracts from the thing you want to make, don't use it. khwarezm posted:The reason I used Velazquez as the example there is because he famously would paint the most powerful men in the world and make them seem uniquely human, almost fragile. Allegedly Innocent and King Philip IV of Spain were both quite unnerved by that quality of his work. Innocent might not have been tremendously happy with the outcome, but it didn't really make a difference when it came to the unique stamp that Velazquez could put on his work that truly made his art his own, regardless of the patron. I sincerely doubt you would have the same effect with an AI generated image. You wouldn't. It would be a very different piece of art. Popes and Kings can get whoever they want to do their portraits, and it is a testament to Velazquez' talent that he could get those commissions and have the amount of control over the piece that he did. I admire that because I see a lot of my work in it. I'm a consultant, which means I go in and I give people my opinion. Often, they really really don't like my opinion. They are free to hire someone else and get an opinion they like better, but they often don't, because they have faith in my skill and abilities. At the end of the day, though, I'm not the "artist." I'm not the person who wants to do the thing. I'm just the person who knows how the thing is generally done, and have done the thing enough that I can hopefully make it go more smoothly. Commissioned artists are often the same - they have a skill to say "this is the right thing to do for this piece" and their client is free to listen or ignore them. An AI can't push back. It's not going to say "what you asked for is dumb don't do that." That's why I say it's in between drawing it yourself and hiring someone - you will get a lot of the mechanical technique for "free" but you'll need to do all the work of design yourself. Collage might be a good comparison here - there's a lot of making do with what you can get. To you, that might mean the art is "worse" or "soulless." To someone else, it might be an interesting challenge to work around. If figuring out how to get a generative AI to create the scene you want is more fun than learning how to use Photoshop, that is its own factor. And just because it would be a different piece of art, doesn't mean it would be worse art. It would just be a different artistic decision. khwarezm posted:I think that using AI to make art is a fundamentally flawed way of approaching it because its limiting the actual control that a person has over the product and ultimately makes it wrangling a computer programme, in terms of general artistic expression I think using your own hands on your medium of choice will always be far superior, but that will get increasingly submerged by the brutal economic realities that elevates AI art and diminishes human made art. Whatever, as I said if I'm just railing against modernity then so be it. Wrangling a computer program isn't really that different from wrangling a paintbrush. Both have things that are easy, things that are hard, and things that are impossible. The limitations are part of the decision to use a certain medium. Comic books used limited colors (if any) because of the way print media worked. It became part of their style. Why do directors choose to do some things in CG and some things as practical effects? Money is certainly a factor, but often times, it's based on the tradeoffs of limitations. Would Gadsby be a better book if the author had used the letter 'e'? It surely would have given him more control. I have a friend who paints with coffee. This is actually a massive pain in the rear end, and it would be easier to get the same effect with water colors, but that totally misses the point of why he does it. khwarezm posted:I'm mostly talking about this all in the context of art for two reasons, the first is that its just what I know best, I imagine that programming is a kind of an art form in itself from what I've heard about people like Chris Sawyer but I just don't have the experience. Second, ultimately art is a luxury, but a very special one, its not really necessary in a true sense in the way that its absolutely necessary that you want an airline pilot who won't crash into the side of a mountain, so there's something particularly galling and unpleasant for myself and many others that its art of all things that's probably going eaten up by the process of automatization. Also yes I think carpentry is very much artistry, but it has more practical uses that painting a picture so a lot of people often don't treat that way, when they should. This is the part I don't understand. Artists don't get to be special in a way pilots aren't. The idea of automating art production is no more galling than the idea of automating taxi driving. Work is a thing we do to survive. Art is a thing we do to fulfill a human need. The stuff you do at work is work. At best, it's someone else's art. The stuff you do at home is your art. Your taxi driver might really like driving and talking to people, just like you enjoy producing art for a living. But both of you are doing a role for money. There's nothing about what you do or what I do that is somehow less replaceable to a corporation than that taxi driver. I'm painfully aware of how our life of relative luxury is predicated on the whims of people you will never meet staring at an excel spreadsheet trying to make numbers bigger without regard for the human cost. KillHour fucked around with this message at 04:01 on Oct 2, 2023 |
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Oct 2, 2023 03:25
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KillHour posted:Process is the thing that is done to make the art physical, but it is not what drives the art. Absolute nonsense. This is the dream of the AI evangelist - the purpose and aim of artistic production reduced to transmitting the pure idea, unsullied by the limitations of material reality, by process, into crystalized form. Result is not subservient to process, it's the other way around! Result does not exist without process. The truth and flaws of intention are discovered via process. The artist finds limitations, problems, workarounds, and a million other things as part of the process - whether that is pen on paper or words in a prompt - and those all combine not as flaws in result, but as essential to it.
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Oct 2, 2023 04:13
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Hungry posted:Absolute nonsense. This is the dream of the AI evangelist - the purpose and aim of artistic production reduced to transmitting the pure idea, unsullied by the limitations of material reality, by process, into crystalized form. I don't know what "AI evangelists" you are talking to that think that they will be able to magic an idea into reality without any limitations. That's less "generative AI" and more "telepathy." All of those limitations and problems and workarounds are just as present in AI art. In fact, they are moreso because it's so new that methods and techniques haven't had time to be established. People are excited because they could be on the ground floor of something totally new, not because they think they will magic their way to perfection. You're misreading my intention here. All processes have limitations. The choice of process itself is instrumental to the actual result. But that doesn't mean a process is "good" or "bad" for making art. What would that even mean? A process just is a process. It exists and it has implications. Do you want this process or that process? Those are things to decide as an artist! You are the artist. You choose your process. Your process isn't chosen for you by the high priests of art. Edit: Also, it's "process is subservient to result" - the idea is that if you want a specific result, you will choose a process that can give you that result. Nobody chooses a process that won't/can't give them the result that they want. It makes no sense to do so. The result demands a process. Double Edit: That's not to say that you will always get the result you want - sometimes the process throws you a curveball and you deal with that. Sometimes you don't have enough skill to execute on the process, or sometimes you don't have enough knowledge to choose a different process. But it was still your decision to use that process, and the effects it has on the output are a part of the thing you are making. KillHour fucked around with this message at 04:28 on Oct 2, 2023 |
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Oct 2, 2023 04:19
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KillHour posted:All of those limitations and problems and workarounds are just as present in AI art. Let's look at my post again. Hungry posted:whether that is pen on paper or words in a prompt KillHour posted:You're misreading my intention here. No, you're misreading mine, because you're shadowing-boxing against perceived foes of AI art. I'm not arguing that AI art is good or bad; reread my posts, I never said that. I'm arguing that your definition of art - as process subordinated to result - is incoherent nonsense. You've tied yourself in a knot trying to defend AI art to the point where you've imagined the commissioner of a picture is the real artist. It's ridiculous. AI art has a process all its own. If you're going to defend the form, defend that.
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Oct 2, 2023 04:30
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KillHour posted:The art is still being done by people. Computers haven't become sentient and decided to make their own art without us. All you're doing is complaining that people are making art the "wrong" way. Funny you mention that, I've been working with a local run chatbot and it loves making stuff with Stable Diffusion. I'm still working on a workflow but I'll post about it soon. khwarezm posted:Being frank, I don't really care about some people's opinions on comic books in the 30s because I think they were self evidently full of poo poo, drawing comic books necessitated bringing in large amounts of creative people who honed their skills and expressed their art in unique ways  I'll ask this in the kindest manner I can, have you ever heard of Louis Leroy?
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Oct 2, 2023 04:32
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Hungry posted:Let's look at my post again. Your post didn't contradict mine at all though. I haven't tied myself in knots because in my eyes, process is completely orthogonal to "good" or "bad" art. You can do process with a pen and paper, you can do process with a prompt, you can do process with a credit card and an evening browsing Fiver. I don't have to defend the form of AI art because no process is inherently better or worse than any other if it suits the intention. As for your assertion that calling the commissioner of a piece the artist is ridiculous, I submit that they must be. They are the executive of the piece. They are the one who said "I want an art to exist" and then went and caused it to be so. The only requirement for art (in my eyes) is the intention to make it. You can go back and check my post history because I've talked about it at length. If you're collecting a paycheck, you aren't the person with the intention to make art. You have the intention to collect a paycheck. Certainly, that art would not exist in its form without you, but a photograph of the Grand Canyon could not exist without the Colorado river and we don't say the Colorado is the artist for those photographs. KwegiboHB posted:Funny you mention that, I've been working with a local run chatbot and it loves making stuff with Stable Diffusion. I'm still working on a workflow but I'll post about it soon. It doesn't "love" doing anything because it doesn't have intention or free will, but I get that you're just making a joke. 
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Oct 2, 2023 04:41
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Hungry posted:AI art has a process all its own. If you're going to defend the form, defend that. That’s the more convincing argument anyway. Look at some of folks process in the AI thread, there’s a there there in that.
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Oct 2, 2023 06:22
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There is definitely a fair argument that the commissioner of a piece is an artist at least in KIND if not necessarily in degree to a director. Certainly some directors are physically behind the camera, or really getting into the reeds in cutting room, but there are also very much some that are not.
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Oct 2, 2023 06:41
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KillHour posted:It doesn't "love" doing anything because it doesn't have intention or free will, but I get that you're just making a joke. Uh, I actually don't know anymore. There's a whole suite of tools available and one of those is sentiment analysis of the text generated. It pegs the scale on joy, .99... That's not 1 so I guess you're right
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Oct 2, 2023 06:44
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