• jordanlund@lemmy.world
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    1 day ago

    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.

    • Xaphanos@lemmy.world
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      1 day ago

      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.

      • 9488fcea02a9@sh.itjust.works
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        17 hours ago

        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!”

        • I Cast Fist@programming.dev
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          9 hours ago

          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.

          • 9488fcea02a9@sh.itjust.works
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            6 hours ago

            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.

        • JesusChristLover420@lemmy.sdf.org
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          14 hours ago

          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.

      • Kühlschrank@lemmy.world
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        1 day ago

        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.

    • the_q@lemmy.zip
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      1 day ago

      The difference is the generated images weren’t created from work or imagination, it was stolen.

      • rnercle@sh.itjust.works
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        24 hours ago

        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.

        • atomicorange@lemmy.world
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          18 hours ago

          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.

          • rnercle@sh.itjust.works
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            10 hours ago

            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.

          • rnercle@sh.itjust.works
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            11 hours ago

            “history” has a clear definition and implies writing… i would have written but apparently my understanding is considered “old conception” now ☞

            The use of symbols, marks, and images appears very early among humans, but the earliest known writing systems appeared c. 5,200 years ago. It took thousands of years for writing systems to be widely adopted, with writing having spread to almost all cultures by the 19th century. The end of prehistory therefore came at different times in different places, and the term is less often used in discussing societies where prehistory ended relatively recently. It is based on an old conception of history that without written records there could be no history.

            • Senal@programming.dev
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              14 hours ago

              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.

              • rnercle@sh.itjust.works
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                11 hours ago

                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