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Talking about an event from 2016 (concerning AI-generated movements of models) is utterly irrelevant to what AI art is today.
What artists think about AI-generated art is arguably as relevant as asking what horse buggy operators felt about early automobiles. Not completely irrelevant, because their ability to navigate roads and the business of moving people around cities would give them insight into the newly disrupted industry.
AI generated art and literature is likely to be similarly disruptive. Some artists and authors will lead the changing industry, because of how their existing skills help them take advantage of new technologies. Others will either fill a diminishing niche of expensively but purely human generated art and literature, or find another industry.
Guillermo del Toro’s comments remind me of Newton’s belief that God was necessary to explain planetary motion. Newton was a brilliant scientist, just as Guillermo is a brilliant artist, but he views art almost spiritually in a way which seems to make him unable to see how the benefits of recent advances in technology will transform art for the better. (for the better of mankind, not necessarily for each individual artist)
This is what they said about rap in the 80s, sampling was only derivative.
And that statement had many opposing it. All human expression is a form of art. All art is a form of human expression. Or at least, sentient thought.
But using a machine to create rap would have been a mechanical process. It would never produce art. Same as with AI generated images. They look great, but they’re not art. Art is about interpreting the world.
However, a human director for an AI may create art using AI as a tool, similar to a drum computer or Paintshop Pro.
Until someone demonstrates an AI comment
Absolutely – AI generated art is an enabler for those without great artistic talent or time but still have the creativity. It’s amazing the possibilities it’s opening up!
As a consumer of art (we all are) I am not at all interested in AI “art”. I see art as one person communicating their inner state of mind to another. A sentence that resulted in a tool generating some weird picture tells me very little about the person, as he has obviously not put much effort either except to pick a result he liked more than the others.
However maybe once they stop looking weird generated AI/ML pictures will find a place in articles where you’d need to pay for a stock photo of something rela
The problem is that comparing “an AI learning to move” to “an AI that leans to create the finished drawing without any of the intermediate steps” is like comparing a submarine to a truck. There is nothing in common other than humans built (some part) of it.
The better comparisons involve existing AI usage:
Facial recognition – Still sucks, low resolution, has a hard time with African faces because they’re dark.
Automated Voice Recognition – Still possible to miss up to 100% of the words said, because the train
Art is subjective. People already enjoy plastic, formulaic music that’s devoid of any imagination, why would it be different for pictures?
Yes, “art” is up in the air. I don’t think record labels would argue they’re out to churn a heap of “art” out, to them it’s a paycheck and they know it. If it’s listened to by septembers that still think it’s art, well, the word is subjective.
Algos will play a big game of “what number comes next?” and it’s not art, it’s Solve For X. Very simple. But because that word is so finicky, it’s easily put into the hands of a person and a single click is arguably all it takes to comprise a human expression. Answer’s
Art also often is more the name than the work itself – see how many paintings etc disappear from view once proven not to be the named artists actual work (many older artists had students working under them that produced work, which the artists then signed).
Why is my trashcan can not worth anything yet something exactly the same can get displayed in a gallery somewhere and valued in the millions? Because Im not a well known artist, while the other person is.
The person in this story, would we give a shit about his opinion at all if he didnt have the background he does?
Probably not, and the fact that we have to have his background explained to us as part if the summary supports that – if it was “random person”, it wouldnt even be a story, but because he has a background then we get to discuss his opinion.
Why is sticking a banana to a wall art? I don’t know. But I’m fairly sure me nailing an orange next to it won’t be considered art. For the same reason: Fuck all.
So my orange is a derivative work.
I’d be willing to sell it for just 100k instead of a couple millions.
This is probably the best thing about AI. The human can’t fit whatever reason produce the art, but they can prompt the machine to. Like masters used to prompt their students to do, except now everyone can do it.
For things like creating art for a video or meme it’s great.
If you paint, and donâ(TM)t have a can of lead haired in your back yard. You are just a pose. Worse still if you practice this modern plein air crap with store bought pigments in those evil tubes.
We are getting to the point where the human influence to create is getting muddled. But much of art as we think about it
Not only is art subjective, so are insults, or at least ones reaction to them.
The basic definition of insult is injury, and the AI doesn’t injure art or life. The market place, however, often seems to do so.
Well, when AI threatens to put me out of my job, then it is “an insult to life itself.”
All the other kinds of tech that have put other people out of their jobs since the industrial revolution are fine, though.
Well, when AI threatens to put me out of my job, then it is “an insult to life itself.”
All the other kinds of tech that have put other people out of their jobs since the industrial revolution are fine, though.
Well, when AI threatens to put me out of my job, then it is “an insult to life itself.”
All the other kinds of tech that have put other people out of their jobs since the industrial revolution are fine, though.
Yep. Artists can just retrain and get jobs repairing AI-artists or robots or whatnot.
Maybe they can all get jobs trying to invent new jobs? There’s going to be quite the demand, get in early.
Duchamp’s urinal was an insult to art and all it stood for. That is what made it brilliant.
Loab is the epitome of what AI brings to art.
It sucks.
I watched about half of it with my wife a couple evenings ago. It sucks donkey balls.
The “painstaking labor of art” is a load of crapola. It doesn’t matter how much you work on a piece of utter carp, it’s still a piece of utter crap.
Characters look horrible. Voiceovers are corny, annoying, over-the-top. We feckin HATED Pinocchio, both as voice and as character. Geppetto came out as a depressed drunkard who didn’t know what the hell he wanted, the only somewhat OK character was the cricket. Everyone else was… we just wanted to backslap them over and over. We stopped watching it because it made us grind our teeth and swear at the screen.
So, when Guillermo del Toro talks about capturing “the softness of a human face”, he certainly did NOT mean Pinocchio the 2022 Netflix shit movie. That movie was anything BUT.
More to the point: while I agree AI doesn’t create stuff from scratch, it can refreshingly reinterpret stuff in a different style. I watched on YouTube a few songs reinterpreted as videos using AI-generated series of images, and they were brilliant. And going back to the dreadful Pinocchio movie, that’s just as much art as AI generated one, because it’s not made from scratch, it’s a reinterpretation of an existing story.
It sucks.
I agree it did, and mostly for the same reasons. That being said, I forced my way through mostly to appreciate the sets and the effort that went into creating it. There’s a 30 minute documentary about creating it that’s a lot more watchable. Stop motion, with its anchor to the physical world, seems to avoid the uncanny valley that AI can easily fall into.
I have seen some REALLY uncanny looking stop motion. The devil is in the details. Well done animation can look good, whatever the tools.
Art is often not appreciated in it’s original context. Some of the operas and symphonies that became most famous as works of art, like Carmen, were widely denounced when they first appeared. (Of course, more often the things denounced fade into oblivion. I’m just saying you mustn’t judge this too quickly.)
Additionally, art is NEVER created from scratch. Perhaps some Neanderthal did, but nobody since then, and I doubt even that. The classic way of saying this is “Immature artists borrow, mature artists
Is Carmen famous as a work of art or a work of entertainment? To be clear: I’m not saying that it’s a dichotomy: some entertainment is art, and some art is entertaining. But neither is really a subset of the other. Bizet himself said that the toreador’s march was populist schlock.
How do you draw a distinction between a work of art and a work of entertainment? The only valid distinction I can imagine is that not all art is entertaining. The question of how deep a work of art is doesn’t apply to it’s aspect of entertainment, but rather to how many “valid” layers of meaning one can derive from it. And “valid” is in quotes for a reason. Consider Andy Warhol’s Tomato Soup can. I don’t know if there’s yet a consensus as to how good a work of art it was, but it was definitely both inf
Totally concur, watch Comencini’s version rather. No CGI either.
Just like “offense”, insults are a choice in the mind of those choosing to be offended or insulted. It says more about them than anything else.
Those who take offense or insult easily are looking to be offended — usually to try to manipulate someone else.
Man, this is tricky to condense into coherent thought because there’s a lot of angles to take here; the hubris of successful creators, the definition of ‘human made’ when using technology
It is no different from switching from a finger to a brush, from a hand-crank projector to a motor driven one. From tedious black and white single cell animation to digital compositing of those hand drawn color cells or wooden puppetry to those with malleable silicon, life-like skin.
What it has done is made it easier to produce the vision in the creator’s head.
I remember watching an episode of Star Trek: The Next Generation, where adults on a hidden planet wanted kids so bad they stole them from the Enterprise. The kids were scanned to find out what they were best at. One kid was slotted to be a musician, another a sculptor, and they were given tools that allowed their minds to produce music and sculptures without the constraints of technique borne through intense study and devoted practice.
This is what technology brings to every act of creation it seems – from woodworking to painting, architecture to movie making. When asked why Avatar 2 took so long to make, one of the reasons Cameron cited was the technology wasn’t up to spec to what he wanted to do, until recently.
It seems that with each advance you’re going to have two broad groups: those that want to use the new tech to create even more
“It’s not fair,” they’ll think, but it comes out in claims that every gain in efficiency is offset by a loss in detail or capability or – if they’re really out of absolutely every idea – they’ll start claiming it lacks ‘soul’ or ‘human emotion’ – even when it’s indistinguishable, or in some cases, superior to completely hand crafted details. Look at the folks who get overly excited about records vs digital recordings, about practical effects vs. digital.
Is it really a problem that someone who may not have great skill with the brush but has a vision can now create, say, 90% of what they’re imagining? Perhaps even use it as a tool to drive to 90% when their vision is a bit unclear? Is it a problem if in the future, that tool can give them 100%, however far off that may be?
I’m just waiting for one of them to slip up and admit, “It took me years of intense study and devoted practice and it’s just NOT FAIR that you can do it so easily.”
Man, this is tricky to condense into coherent thought because there’s a lot of angles to take here; the hubris of successful creators, the definition of ‘human made’ when using technology
Man, this is tricky to condense into coherent thought because there’s a lot of angles to take here; the hubris of successful creators, the definition of ‘human made’ when using technology
It goes way beyond that since AI can replace people, we’re having another industrial revolution but it’s coming for more and more complex skills humans used to do, aka more an more people are becoming increasingly obsolete, hence the rise in inequality, aka there will always be demand for top tier skilled human beings but we need fewer skilled humans to do the same amount of work, that leaves less good paying work for the masses.
There’s a trick in there, isn’t there? Automation reduces the value of human work on a sliding skill scale. Since human work equals money in most places, and money is required to live in most places, that’s a problem waiting to happen, especially as the lower ends drop out and the skills require ever more specialization to remain relevant.
Hopefully, we figure out the social context of having devalued the value of work to near zero so we can end up with a utopia rather than a revolution, but who knows.
As for why this is popping up now, I suspect that it’s because artists have long felt themselves immune to this advancement, believing that there’s some ineffable quality to their works that represents soul or spirit or emotion, that cannot be quantified, much less reproduced on demand. Even cyberpunk & dystopian authors seem to have this mental blindspot : AI can terraform worlds, coordinate space battles across light years, run planets, cater to every human whim
I think this is just getting some special outrage because of this lack of foresight. They didn’t think it was coming for them, not so soon, not so close to the gates. It’s like what happened when folks were able to reprint sheet music so easily, and the original creators flipped the hell out, tried to fix it with laws and performance rights and so on. It’ll be the same thing here.
Art exists for two purposes: to enrich the creator in the act of creation (which apparently has no value here by either the AI or complaining creators who feel undone), and by the consumers – the very humans that are
What does that even mean? Some shared yet indescribable feature that we all have but can lose, perhaps that we can fight for and regain? Seriously, let me know because you can check every atom and you won’t find a measure of the “human spirit” among
It’s interesting to hear from an artist on slashdot at all. Like most of us I’m a techie. Like most people on slashdot, I am an aging techie. Technology is nipping at our heels all the time. You invest a lot of effort in learning something to differentiate yourself and stay relevant, but 3 years later nobody can tell you apart from somebody who just learned to acco
Relax. AI is just another tool for human expression. As the tech advances, one of the things that will happen is that it will offer more knobs to turn than just a single English-language prompt. (Already people are learning that how the prompt is constructed can be an act of creative expression in itself.)
One of the things you’ll notice then is that some people are better than others at turning those knobs. A few are a LOT better than the rest.
That’ll be your next generation of artists. You can fight p
People need to stop thinking of AI as reducing the value of human labor, and instead think of it as reducing the value of the output of human labor. It’s almost the same thing, but the latter puts the focus on how people will gain the same amount of value for less input. This sometimes makes labor itself more valuable, because what was once too expensive to build a large market can now be produced for much less. Software developers, for instance, are in far more demand now that we are far more productive th
In my experience, automation has made previously expensive products and services cheap and affordable commodities. But the quality has gotten cheap, too, and the high quality goods and services have gotten much harder to find and, if available, much more expensive than they had been.
In my experience, automation has made previously expensive products and services cheap and affordable commodities. But the quality has gotten cheap, too, and the high quality goods and services have gotten much harder to find and, if available, much more expensive than they had been.
That certainly is common, but it isn’t always just low quality & cheap vs high quality & expensive. In programming for example, automation (compilers) made all software much higher quality. On the other hand, low code SaaS is arguably an example of low quality & cheap.
For art I think there will be many markets. There is likely to be a large market for lower quality cheap art (but higher quality than today’s cheap art), a moderately expensive market for artists who use AI as a tool but keep the q
I think I’ll stick with the first thing that popped in my head: AI is a tool.
If you want to see an AI image generator sucked that is trying to take into account the wishes of artists, take a look at the Unstable Diffusion Kickstarter [kickstarter.com].
They are aghast at how corporations are rushing into AI Image generation, and nerfing tools to limit creating what can be produced.
This kickstarter includes a lot of artists that what to have AI generation take account of the ethics of image generation, without placing a lot of
I get what you are saying. Being able to visualize something with the help of an ai tool is eminently useful. However, visualization is not art, not a creative expression driven by a heart and mind. An illustration can be art or it can just be a mechanical, soulless result. Since we do not have an ai at a human or beyond level yet with a heart and mind, pretty much anything that looks and feels good is likely to have a lot of plagiarism in there. At best what you have is an imitation and a glimpse into an
I remember watching an episode of Star Trek: The Next Generation, where adults on a hidden planet wanted kids so bad they stole them from the Enterprise. The kids were scanned to find out what they were best at. One kid was slotted to be a musician, another a sculptor, and they were given tools that allowed their minds to produce music and sculptures without the constraints of technique borne through intense study and devoted practice.
This is what technology brings to every act of creation it seems – fro
Doesn’t want machines to create art, but fails to notice that humans are (biological) machines. Appeals to the “soul” that humans have. This is the oldest AI argument.
Better hope your “soul” can create art that people like better than what a machine can produce.
For many artists (and many art consumers), this is not good business news. Also not good for your “soul’s ego I imagine.
First robots replaced assembly workers. Now they replace fungible “artists”.
When I was at the MIT AI Lab back around 1980, one pop
People had similar reactions to artificial insemination. OMG test tube babies! They won’t have *souls*!
Now most people in a western country probably know at least one, probably has no idea, and you have to be a special kind of religious zealot to think they should be treated any differently than anybody else.
Is AI-Generated Art ‘an Insult to Life’?
Is AI-Generated Art ‘an Insult to Life’?
It’s an insult to life, Jim, but not as we know it.
YES! but art is an expression so in that aspect the AI is empty because it is expressing nothing of it’s own thought/feeling/experience. Technically it will surpass human technical expression as machines have outdone human physical abilities.
Conveying ideas to humans to interpret and discover or to inspire or invoke an emotion maybe an association — that will be difficult but possible especially when that counts so much on the human to interpret the meaning for themselves than reply heavily upon the arti
YES! but art is an expression so in that aspect the AI is empty because it is expressing nothing of it’s own thought/feeling/experience.
YES! but art is an expression so in that aspect the AI is empty because it is expressing nothing of it’s own thought/feeling/experience.
I don’t consider these kind of NN/MLs to be actual AI, so I might quibble that they are “expressing” anything. And I agree that they are certainly not “thinking” much less “feeling”.
However, Art is what you read into it.
What does this painting mean to you, the recipient? Your thoughts are not the artists thoughts; you only imagine that you empathize with the artist.
And most art doesn’t evoke anything particularly meaningful. It might tug on your emotions by recalling OTHER art that you did have feelings abo
Is AI-Generated Art ‘an Insult to Life’?
Hey, wait a second, someone has to program and train these AI’s! Are programmers not alive? Do we not count?
Honestly I love art and creativity but this drumbeat against AI from artists is getting me close to siding with the AI.
AI is just a tool! Through all of human history humans have only profited from tools, and artists will be no different.
Technology helps augment what people can do and remove the worst kinds of work. That should be celebrated!
AI is just a tool!
I see a lot of these comments about AI just being a tool. But that is not the promise of AI – it was supposed to be much more than just a tool. (though I’m not holding my breath until it gets there)
I view art as the transcoding of emotional information into sound, music, dance and movement, patterns, etc. .
If there is no emotion, there is no art.
I view art as the transcoding of emotional information into sound, music, dance and movement, patterns, etc. .
If there is no emotion, there is no art.
Natural scenes are very often considered art, yet I don’t consider nature to have emotion.
I am not a professional artist – my workaday life is something else. But, I am a very creative and artistic person who has worked in almost all media at one time or another, and who has a made some money with his art, had some exhibitions, won some prizes, etc. As an artist, but NOT a professional artist dependent on my craft for income, my thoughts on this subject seem to be mainly blase and detached. I am, to be sure, fascinated by the new capabilities of AI to generate poetry, visual, arts, and other
This is also a self-organizing controlled system that will have certain bounds. If too many wannabee “artists” flood the market with new imagery, there will simply be too much for anyone to view.
What happens when the AI generated art starts flooding back into the AI training models and swamps out input from real artists…
Sorry I don’t have time to write up a longer more thoughtful response, great post.
Fascinating question. You are correct in observing that caveat. Only the future will tell.
I think AI-based workflows will be like photography.
On can say that photos are not “art”, it is no creative because you only make a copy of what already exists in real life… And it is obviously wrong. Cameras don’t setup themselves, point themselves at the right direction, select the right picture, and publish it themselves. They may automate a lot of tasks these days, but you are definitely going to notice the difference when a random guy points, shoots and lets its phone do its best, and the work of a true photographer.
Same for an AI. There have been prize-winning generated art entries, but these, I suspect, are the result of hours of work with the AI by an actual human artist. I wouldn’t be able to to that as I have no way to even tell what is wrong and what is worthy of a prize, let alone guide an AI to do it.
> radio is alive and well.
bought myself a Roberts Radio and been listening to Jazz / Classical / 70s & 80s Dab
> photography killed painting.
discovered oil painting. found out I can do it naturally like genetics. then thought: stuff photography – that is what I want.
> pencils killed calligraphy.
Calligraphy that is in my to-do list. Blend that with Gesture Drawings. Imagine how cool? Urban Sketching in Ink. No room for errors.
> So called artist
That’s the tl’dr.
One might argue that true art requires an emotional message. Or one might argue that the mechanics of art are what defines art.
Which seem like mutually exclusive positions until you start asking whether a rainbow over a waterfall at dusk can be “art” if it elicits the emotional response without the hand of a human creator to craft it…and now we’re no closer to an answer but we have learned that if artistic purists believe a machine cannot create “art” they must also reject the idea that nature can be a wo
I see slashdot has caught up to the late 19th century in artistic philosophy…
Should Envisage Art [youtube.com] done with AI
State of the Art. The chilling effect is when it becomes the art of the state. Consider those ramifications.
Pythagoras planned it. Why did the people stare?
His numbers, though they moved or seemed to move
In marble or in bronze, lacked character.
But boys and girls, pale from the imagined love
Of solitary beds, knew what they were,
That passion could bring character enough,
And pressed at midnight in some public place
Live lips upon a plummet-measured face.
[Yeats, The Statues]
Real art is a way of seeing. In paint for instance. In the poem as sculpture. The problem is when AI can imitate a style well enough to emulat
Can we stop using “AI” to describe any of this?
It has no intelligence. It’s no more intelligent than a fucking banana.
AI generated art may not be drawn by a human, but at least it represents the wish and judgement of one.
To “create an AI art”, you not only enter the prompt as you tweak the settings and judge yourself which of the many generated pictures is the one that represents what you want. your wish for that picture is there.
NFT art on the other hand is a mass produced pieces of “brand” randomly slapped together with the sole purpose of convincing people into buying those with the hope someone will buy those from em.
T
What does it take to make a museum-quality painting?
Non-artists think it simply a matter of ability, but are dead wrong.
Many have the technical skill…vanishingly few ever succeed.
AI generated art is interesting to me in the same way running a photoshop filter on max settings on a photograph just to see what the outcome is like is interesting.
The biggest difference between, say, an affine transform and AI art is that the inputs are plaintext and a library of images, plus whatever additional randomizations are placed in there by the developers. The outputs are correlated to the inputs in a very complex way.
Art, by definition, however, is totally human. Good art is a human skill, in th
Except Picasso is not under copyright.
(modded down for exposing the truth again!)
Tehcinally it was the trainee lawyers who lost their jobs to AI first before the artists.
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