- cross-posted to:
- hackernews
- cross-posted to:
- hackernews
cross-posted from: https://hexbear.net/post/3613920
Get fuuuuuuuuuuuuuucked
“This isn’t going to stop,” Allen told the New York Times. “Art is dead, dude. It’s over. A.I. won. Humans lost.”
“But I still want to get paid for it.”
He didn’t make shit.
A computer made it. He provided some guidance.
Of course he didn’t, but it just makes it worse that the image that’s “ending human art” is distorted and glitchy.
Well in a way all Art is being done indirectly by some sort of instrument. Only the degree of sophistication or degree of separation of this instrument is different. A pencil drawing is in principle also done by the pencil, but I provided a lot of guidance through my hand. A pencil - almost no sophistication - is on one side of the spectrum and Midjourney/Stable Diffusion etc is on the other side of the spectrum.
I don’t want to judge AI “art” in general - there’s so many awful traditional artworks that AI art doesn’t really stand out.
What rubs me the wrong way is that it is a tool that no human can understand reasonably well. Everybody can understand a pencil. It’s possible to understand a computer renderer that renders digital art. But no one can understand the totality of an LLM which was trained on terabytes of images. It’s a lot of trial and error, because what the tool does generate random images even with precise directions. It’s throwing dice until one likes the result.
The one thing I give this “artist” credit for: he was very early (maye even the first?) that entered AI art into a contest and fooled the jury. Being the first is often enough historically to make “great art”. Where art is more measured n the impact it has on a societal discussion. So I give him that.
But a court already decided you can’t copyright AI art, because it’s trained on other art without permission. So he can get fucked.
The pencil does not make the art.
There’s a fundamental difference between AI image generation and an artist creating something that is both inherent and obvious.
If you can’t see that then I’m not sure there’s much help for you.
More than that, art being created by an artist has a style and a feeling behind it. There’s a nostalgia present in every painting. An artist saw something, and recreated it in a way that spoke to them.
An algorithm can recreate images that look similar but with no understanding. It’s just an image and lacks all the things that makes art what it is. By removing humanity from art you literally remove the reason for it to exist.
Flatly, it isn’t art. It’s slightly better than random. But as it happens, humans are better at that too.