- cross-posted to:
- technology@lemmy.world
- comics@lemmy.ml
- cross-posted to:
- technology@lemmy.world
- comics@lemmy.ml
From their mastodon: https://mastodon.social/@oatmeal/115333929613343166
From their mastodon: https://mastodon.social/@oatmeal/115333929613343166
Counter argument:
Early on in the days of AI, so, geeze, like all of 2 years ago now, Steve Coulson was experimenting using Midjourney to create comic books.
You can download them for free, the most impressive one at the time was “The Lesson”:
https://aicomicbooks.com/book/the-lesson-book-by-steve-coulson-download-now/
At this point the creator is less of an artist than they are a producer. He worked from a script and used AI to generate each individual panel of the book.
I’m sure for each panel finally used there were hundreds, if not thousands of rejects, either because they failed to meet the request or didn’t match the style, or the character models weren’t quite right, or there were too many hallucinations, etc. etc.
It still took a human to go through and make the artistic choices necessary to map the images to the narrative and produce the book as a whole.
In this way, AI art is kind of like decoupage. All the images used are pre-existing, but it still takes human intent to select and combine them in a new way.
Very similar things were said when photography was invented. There was great outcry that it debased art as a whole. It took decades before visual symbolic language adapted to the new media and methods. Man Ray was just one artist that found some of the new ground in photography. I’m sure you can find others.
The problem (IMO) is impatience. The pace of innovation is so fast that we’ve forgotten how slowly art history usually happens. We see fads, fashion, and styles change quickly and take it as a permanent seismic shift. Art contains symbolic language that needs to grow and evolve in order to become expressive. Were the first movies masterpieces? Well, they were for the time. But they seem primitive and amateurish to a modern eye. Because the art grew.
I agree the current generation of slop is… Slop. But we haven’t had enough time to judge it this harshly. Yet.
Just to continue your thought on photography - there is masses of photo slop filling up our spaces too. Take it from someone who has to sift through stock photos for my work sometimes.
Agreed.
My parents also said the same thing about electronic music
“it’s not real music, the computer makes it!”
every new technology that lowers the barrier of entry gets derided every time. Tale as old as time.
Every new technology that enables more of the masses to participate will obviously mean more low quality stuff gets made. That doesnt mean the tool is worthless.
Is there a lot of AI slop art? Of course there is… but i hate these anti-AI extremists (especially concentrated in the fediverse) that reject ANYTHING that has even touched AI to be worthless.
“oh what a nice picture… wait what? The artist filled in one corner with AI? it’s total trash!”
Counterpoint: previous technologies also enabled people to do what wasn’t possible before. Photography allowed for perfect captures of a place and time. Electronic music can create sounds that no physical instrument can. So far, AI hasn’t made anything “impossible” possible, it only makes what a skilled artist or writer could make but super fast.
that’s already making an “impossible” into a “possible”… and in my books, that’s a useful tool if you take all the value judgements out of it.
If one brush stroke in a painting were made using the blood of a murdered child as paint, would you treat the entire painting and the artist with suspicion? I would. Maybe a masterpiece could be so good that it would overpower that one act in my subjective evaluation, but it would have to be the masterpiece of a true visionary. I would not be easily persuaded.
Oil is the blood of the very earth on which we depend to live, so to spill it in the name of art is perhaps a greater crime than to spill human blood. Again, I could be persuaded by a masterpiece to set aside the flaws in its creation, but it would require a certain bar of quality.
The difference is the generated images weren’t created from work or imagination, it was stolen.
owning “imagination” or ideas, images or even melodies is a new idea for humanity. For most of our history people wouldn’t even think of owning an idea and profiting from its reproduction.
If I paint a study of Van Gogh’s Starry Night, even though I painted it it’s NOT my art. Trying to sell a reproduction without acknowledgment that I’m not the original artist is forgery and fraud.
you’re still looking at art through the lens (window, frame) of today, my comment was to remind that this proprietary way of seeing art wasn’t always the norm. “Original artist” is itself a product of the market. There were no fraudsters, only artisans making images.
Van Gogh is an interesting example, whose paintings wasn’t worth a cent during his life. Others, later on, profited from his work.
Art world itself is full of absurd examples working on these ideas. (Latest must be the Comedian.
So the images in the book were intentional recreations of existing, discrete pieces of art?
What do you mean by “most of our history” , like in a timeframe sense ?
Copyright as an idea has only really be around since the late 1400s. The intial purpose of copyright was to control which information can be given to the public. It’s now being used by corporations to maintain control over the creative arts.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_copyright#Early_developments
Sure, but that’s not the only way people have guarded ideas.
Secret societies, artisan guilds that only taught it’s members and on occasion killed people who find out their secrets, professions taught only to the direct student.
Just because the formal idea of something was recorded doesn’t mean it wasnt around before.
As people we are constantly hoarding knowledge and ideas to benefit is individually or as a tribe.
rather ☞ As people we are constantly sharing knowledge and ideas to benefit collectively
They aren’t mutually exclusive concepts, both can be true.
The point was that guarding ideas didn’t start with formalised copyright.
“history” has a clear definition and implies writing… i would have written but apparently my understanding is considered “old conception” now ☞
Socrates railed against writing. He is credited with saying that it was a crutch that would reduce the human capacity to remember things.
if you’re writing about Socrates now, that’s because Plato wrote about him.
See: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Found_object
See “decoupage”.