Not good arguments imo. Art can be this ‘blood, sweat and tears’ thing if you are into it, but art also can be an activity you do because you enjoy doing it, without a single fuck given that the result looks like the wet fart of a 3yo. I mostly don’t care how people make art. Scratch your art into rock with a baguette if you feel that’s the level of pain needed, or paint with your period blood if that floats your boat.
But use AI? It is incredibly bad for the environment, uses other people’s work without their consent, and it’s being owned by fascist fucking tech bros who want to drown the world in doom. You wouldn’t kick a puppy and call it art, same goes for AI.
Cue that video where an aitechbrodude said that people don’t like creating… (music in that case, but still).
AI bros don’t care about art or being able to care. They only care about money
Exactly: Minimize effort, maximize return. Do nothing, get credit.
I mean, isn’t making stuff easily kind of the whole point? I doubt AI bros suck OpenAI cock due to their passion for the arts.
I have a hypothesis: Art requires creativity and other skills that are inherently irrational/emotional, so AI bros want to believe that art can be produced with AI running on a cold hard deterministic machine, because that would mean society doesn’t need artists and other “irrational” people, and then their TESCREAL “rationalist” dream of a perfect society would be viable.
I don’t even think I really disagree with the core of your point here, but I think you’re incorrect in conflating irrationality, emotion, and non-determinism. If you want to take apart a brain and show me the warm soft non-determinism please do. But I think the reality of everything we know about the world suggests the human mind is an incredibly complex deterministic machine, orders of magnitude beyond the abilities of the machines we create.
The problem with fast food bros is -not- that they can’t cook, it’s that they want it EASY.
The problem with social media bros is -not- that they can’t write letters, it’s that they want it EASY.
The problem with clothes buying bros is -not- that they can’t weave or sew, it’s that they want it EASY.
Nobody who buys a Big Mac tries to pass it off as them being a chef.
Nobody who posts on social media tries to pass it off as them being published writers.
Nobody who buys clothes tries to pass it off as them being seamstresses.
AI bros call themselves “artists” for doing the functional equivalent of going to Rotten Ronnies and ordering a Big Mac and asking for no pickle.
Ok, I get that you object to people who use AI to make images calling the images “art” and calling themselves “artists”. But I hope you understand that language evolves with use, and that you wouldn’t have the same objection to expanding the traditional meaning of “women” to include trans women.
Oh FUCK YOU for trying to tie your LLMbecile wankery to human rights!
Just fuck the fuck right the fuck off.
things
isare*AI bros would never be able to handle the downvotes from correcting spelling and grammar errors—only us enthisiasts are passionate enough!
I’m not mocking the post, as i am in aggreance. I’m merely attempting humor.
impove
You don’t need an uncritical belief in the Labour Theory of Value to think that human labour has a special value and dignity to it. The people who want AI to replace many kinds of intellectual labour just don’t believe that there’s a value to human labour, and I do think this is fundamentally an antihuman, misanthropic way of looking at the world.
Preach… this statement should be enough
I have no idea about all this stuff, but I have a question: so you have artists who work with computers. Let’s say a 3D artist for the movie Jurrasic Park. So if a computer creates a sphere for you to build a dinosaur head out of it this is “good”, because you had to work longer on it, but if it creates the whole head for you to work on this is “bad”, because they need less time for basics? They would have more time to be creative this way, or not? I really struggle to understand when something is considered “good” or “bad” in that context. I mean even if someone is working on an elaborate AI prompt to generate an image, isn’t that art? Maybe it’s not the art of painting, but the art of describing a scene to someone? Just wondering…
Art has always had that issue. Is a potato print worse than a hand drawn figure?
Sometimes you need to know the material or technique to appreciate the effort.
It also applies outside of art. It’s not always the end product that is important. We can appreciate things for being more difficult than necessary. Like the game Roller Coaster Tycoon being impressive because it was coded in assembly, or the Olympic guy who no-scoped in the shooting competition etc.
If the AI prompt is the effort, it should be appreciated as such, instead of comparing the end product against other techniques. We also don’t compare airbrushed grafitti artwork to oil paintings, because even if the end product of both is a neat picture, it’s impossible to judge against each other.
I think you’re asking exactly the right question. I have seen even fellow 3D artists struggle with answering this. Where is the legitimacy when a machine does work for me? and what -as an artist- do I bring to the table? As an illustrator and 3D animator, my answer is : intent. As long as I am controlling the important variables, I am controlling the gist of my creation. I am creating what I see with my mind’s eye, using the sensibility and the motor control that I’ve developed through years of practice. What my 3D program does for me is essentially give me virtual clay to sculpt with, virtual armatures to rig with, virtual photons to render with. But I’m the one drawing textures, I’m the one handling the paintbrush, moving those controllers in the timeline, ultimately creating that vision. And I think this stays valid even when I’m using an AI texture generator to fill in some secondary stuff I can’t be bothered to work hours on : it’s not relevant to the intent of the film/picture.
And here we have it exactly: intentionality is what distinguishes art from slop.
Maybe it’s not all there is…, but I think it’s at least a good starting point
What does that mean for Jackson Pollock style paintings, where the content of the painting is at least partly determined by chance?
Or algorithmic art, where the artist writes code for a computer to execute (such as a fractal renderer or cellular automata) but doesn’t necessarily know what the final result will look like?
Or Duchamp’s Fountain, or photography in general, where you’re just adding a frame to a thing you didn’t create.
I feel like 10 years ago it would be very uncontroversial to say something like “art is as much discovery and the act of selection as it is creation”, but not so much now.
I feel like all of those are or were driven by creative intent. I am personally not moved much by Duchamp or Pollock, I feel like they exist more to advance the discourse than being art pieces in themselves. Then again I am not looking for an all-encompassing definition of art.
Why include photography here ? do you not feel most of the work lies in selecting a moment in time & a point of view ?
do you not feel most of the work lies in selecting a moment in time & a point of view?
I do feel that way, which is why in the next paragraph I mention selection.
Ah, I see, ok.
I feel like 10 years ago it would be very uncontroversial to say something like “art is as much discovery and the act of selection as it is creation”, but not so much now.
Why not now ?
Because, as a reaction to generative AI, so much emphasis is now placed on authorial intent, and the interplay of that intent and the process by which the artist realizes it. Such as being able to recognize a specific artist’s mannerisms and read emotions into the shape of their individual brush strokes. Like in your previous comment:
I am creating what I see with my mind’s eye, using the sensibility and the motor control that I’ve developed through years of practice.
I feel as if 10 years ago the conversation was very different. I think back then if someone said “the most important thing about art is being able to see the imprints of the artist’s will flowing from their mind, through their hand, and into the workpiece” people would immediately bring up something like Fountain and say that art can also lie in selection and the creation of context, not just in the creation of the object itself.
Sure. okay. I’m more in the camp of “why does AI do things that humans should do?”
Why does AI draw or make music or write poems but I have to sort everything out myself and still go to work.
Why can’t AI do things that make this world a job prison ?
Even then I don’t trust the oligarchs using AI for our benefit. Even if AI could do menial work it would be used against us.
People being brutal, people crying over critique isn’t “just how art goes”, and isn’t a universal experience. I would actually call it “abuse” instead.
It’s a good argument against trying to be a real artist, using AI sounds far less stressful
Seriously, it’s a horrible argument to make in favour of real art. Who reads that and goes “sounds great, I’m in”? Yep. Nobody.
if you want to be a REAL artists you have to accept emotional and verbal abuse from people who are supposedly helping you, and you will ENJOY IT and this is NORMAL
Lots of people in this very comment section seem to agree with it…
A tremendous amount of issues in the world stem from people not understanding what abuse is and passing it on to others as “the way it has to be.”
I started painting in my late 30s and love it, and get regular compliments and good natured critiques of my work. I have never cried about it, and if someone thought I needed to be torn down to improve, they would no longer be in my life. But I don’t hold any delusions that I’m making high art either.
People tend to have a really shitty grasp of context and nuance. People also do use AI becaue they want to skip the work and go straight to rewards. These all stem from the same issue: lack of care. We’ve been trained to see the world like rich people: devoid of empathy, compassion, and care. It takes time and energy to understand your situation and formulate a proper reaponse. Sometimes art is a struggle and it takes time and energy to overcome your limits or figure out what it is you actually want from the work. Properly offering good critique requires empathy, and it requires the time and energy to dedicate to the critique.
It’s easy to cruelly criticize. It’s easy to throw out slop. It’s easy to just let the machine do it.
True that
impvoe
Improve? Impress? Upvote? iMovie?
people who love ai 🤝 people who don’t understand or care about consent
What a strangely coded and emotionally loaded critique. “Lazy ai bros who don’t understand consent”
What
a strangely codedaccurately coded andemotionally loadedcompletely honest critique. “Lazy ai bros who don’tunderstandcare about consent”Fixed that for you.
Replace “AI bro” with photographer and “AI art” with photographs here and you have a very tired argument more than a century old at this point. Same with drum kits, autotune and production software in music, any time a technology comes along that makes making art easier a lot of “OG” artists will say it’s the “blood sweat and tears” that make art.
Don’t get me wrong, the VAST majority of ai images are slop, just like the vast majority of photographs are shit. When you make creating images that easy and accessible a lot of people with no concept of aesthetics or creativity will make garbage, but that doesn’t mean that some can be good and true expressions of creativity.
Two points:
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The arguments are not even remotely the same beyond sharing a grammatical parallel. Sort of.
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You know this.
No i don’t know this? Explain how they’re different
The argument the post is making is that making “real art” requires effort, practice, technical skill and talent and that ai art is too easy and thus is not art. The same can be said of taking a photograph of a landscape vs painting that same landscape. The painter might say that there technical ability and effort makes there rendering art, while the photographers isn’t. Therefore anything that makes creating art easier makes that art less valid, which is a very tired old man yelling at clouds argument.
I’m not saying photography and ai image generation are the same, there are other arguments you could make against it like it “stealing” work from other artists, or the environmental cost etc. But on the “its too easy argument” they’re both just pushing a button to make an image at this point.
Tell me you’ve never spent even five minutes doing artistic photography.
… they’re both just pushing a button to make an image at this point.
Ah, yes. That’ll do.
At its most basic, and the way 90% of people interact with the medium, that is it.
Yes you can control settings on the camera and change the angle etc. Just like with ai image generators you can change the settings, prompt etc. To get your desired output.
You can put in effort and take creative license with both photography and ai image generation, most people don’t though. But if what makes a medium valid is the ability to configure and adjust it to fit an aesthetic then both photography and image generation allow that.
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