I feel like some promises were broken 😂
I feel like some promises were broken 😂
You’re absolutely right!
I think that there is AI “art” that goes beyond typing a few words into chat gpt and waiting for a result.
I don’t know how popular this is today but about two years ago I watched lots of people go wild with stable diffusion workflows. It was a whole palette of tools: Control net, Inpainting, sketches with img2img for the composition, corrections in Photoshop and so on. It took hours or days of manual work until people “generated” the image that they initially imagined. I would say that this would count as art… Writing one prompt into your favourite llm and take what you get: not so much.
One example for reference: https://youtu.be/K0ldxCh3cnI
tl;dr - “art” generated by LLMs is ultimately lame and uninspiring. It’s probably never going to inspire people very much. It’s a parlor trick and everyone intrinsically recognizes it. Don’t expect to be taken seriously as a creator if this is your primary tool.
It’s generative AI though, not creative. It can literally only create what it’s seen before. It’s incapable of being original. Not that there’s anything wrong with that. Andy Warhol painted soup cans. But anyone who expects inspiration and creativity from generative AI doesn’t understand the technology as it’s applied…
It generates new content based on what is trained on. not just what is trained on
Where is the new part coming from? The new part can only come from combining things it already knows.
And even that is the part that is already provided by the human as part if the prompt.
Just like it can Hallucinate text, it also hallucinates content. That’s a core part of the generative feature
It hallucinates from incorrectly putting other info in its network together. It is all just stochastics.
That is not original or new its is the core of what slop is.
The problem is that it does not have a goal or even just understands why it is doing what it is doing.
If you know what a ice sculpture of a human looks like and you know what an ice sculputre of a swan looks like you can maybe infer what an “ice sculpture of a flying crocodile with wings” might look like too, by combining what you already know. It’s as much incorrect as your imagination, no?
I am skeptical about “never”, but right now I agree that’s true. I expect it to be true for many years to come. That being said, we have seen a lot of improvement (over even the last few months) in AI image quality, composition, and prompt adherence.
In order for an art piece to exist, an artist have to have something to say by said art. Fancy autocomplete is not an entity, it’s an algorithm to generate something looking like something else, and even if it crawls out of the uncanny valley at some point (which I’m not sure is possible), the best case scenario is that it will generate something that looks like some people did at some point. It’s not what art is, and it’s not what people look for in art. This will never change, this is the never in said never.
AGI will create art, but at this point we’re further away from it than we were 10 years ago, or even 50 years ago (and I would argue it’s a goos thing)That’s not what I’m saying. What I’m saying is that it’s going to be increasingly difficult (for the layperson) to tell if a work is by a human or computer. You and I may think there’s some sort of moral superiority in human art, but the average TikTok user doesn’t give a fuck… and they outnumber us greatly.
Your opinion of an average person is overly negative.
Generated shit is the new Muzak, the new Alegria clipart, but done very badly. When a person who doesn’t care about music and doesn’t understand music hears Muzak they don’t think about it at all, that’s kind of almost the point of it. It’s an amalgamation of a corporate default sequence of sounds invented to be approved by a committee. And that’s the best that generators can wish to do, and I suspect there is a fundamental quality to it that will prevent it from being that ever.
That’s the thing about art, intentionality, it’s not that “human art” is somehow superiour, it’s that only human art exists, copying algorithms are doing copies, and even if sometimes it works, you don’t get art without an artist saying you something.
Obviously, people who don’t enjoy art don’t care. But that doesn’t really matter.
Pregnant Mario lactating Jamba juice all over Blanka from street fighter, indeed.
There are difficult ‘AI’ tools.
Look up controlnet workflows or VACE, just to start, much less little niches in vapoursynth pipelines or image editing layers. You could spend days training them, messing with the implementation, then doing the manual work of carefully and deliberately applying them. This has, in fact, has been happening in film production for awhile, just in disguise.
Same with, say, LLMs used in game mods where appropriate, like the Rimworld mod. That’s careful creative expression.
…As usual, it’s tech bros fucking everything up by dumbing it down to zero-option prompt box and then shoving that in front of as many people as possible to try and monopolize their attention.
In other words, I agree with the author that what I hate about ‘AI art’ is the low effort ‘sloppiness.’ It’s gross, like rotten fast food. It makes me sad. And that’s 99.999% of all AI art.
…But it doesn’t have to be like that.
It’s like saying the concept of the the fediverse sucks because Twitter/Facebook suck, even if 99.999% of what folks see is the slop of the later. It’s not fair to the techniques, and it’s not holding the jerks behind mass slop proliferation accountable.
Precisely. AI art is bad because the users making “art” with it essentially have such bad taste they’ll publish anything the AI shits out.
There exist artistic ways to use AI as a tool, but none of them are easy. In fact they might be harder than just painting the damn picture yourself.
based and real-pilled, the both of you.
i’m excited for the future of art. we have the potential for a new age of renaissance men who master the arts, humanities, and sciences all at once.
i think a lot of people shitting on genAI don’t see engineering itself as art… and i think that’s a piss-poor, deathly sad view of this world. it’s like 2/3 of westerners weirdly resent anything “math or science coded” as they might call it. a shame. a damn shame.
I find this li’l guy hilarious for some reason.
To me, a big part of it is that I’m tired of commodity art. I don’t care about your pretty pixel soup. I’ve seen other pixel soups before that were similarly pretty.
And I’ve been tired for many years, long before every middle-manager under the sun could cook up their own pretty pixel soup.
Back then, it was humans trying to make a living off of their passion and then settling for commodity art to make ends meet. I was cheering them on, because they were passionate humans.Now that generative AI has destroyed that branch of humanity, there’s no one to cheer on anymore.
Even if generative AI never existed in the first place, I’d like to see commodity art being relegated to the sidelines and expressive art coming into the limelight instead.Tell me a story with your art. About your struggles or a brainfart you had, or really anything. This comic is great, for example. There’s emotions there and I can see the human through the art. I would’ve chosen a very different illustration for whatever, for example, which tells me a lot about the artist, but also about myself.
I have never had that kind of introspection with pretty pixel soups.I have never seen particular humans expressing themselves in ai art or music, all i see is the tech company model behind it; be it sora, stable diffusion or mid journey, ai is not a tool for the prompters; the prompters are the tool for the AI model.
I like this take. It sums up the reality of AI quite well.
this reminded me that old Chuck Jones comic in which he encourages young artists to find what works for them instead of trying to fit in.
The Oatmeal! 😍😍 I haven’t been to that site in so long, I’m so glad they’re still around! Thanks for sharing!
Art is beautiful not because economic value has been captured and skewered into aesthetics. It is a part of being human.
Yea, I agree. It is like the anti-ai art luddites don’t understand this… The people making the promps are still making art, just by the nature of it being humans making human decisions. Skill isn’t a gate to art in the same way anymore, despite what the gatekeepers want everyone to believe.
Are you the type of person who pretends you made a cheeseburger when you got it from a drive though window? Because that’s what you sound like.
Prompters don’t make decisions in the piece, the algorithm generated stuff and if the prompter doesn’t like it, then they prompt again. No choices made.
It’s like how you all use the same words when someone disagrees with you, “luddite” and “gatekeeping”. You can’t really think for yourself so your regurgitate what someone else wrote.
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Okay, I’m willing to accept that we generally shouldn’t decide that our personal lines in the sand can serve as meaningful differentiators between art and not-art. By the same token, don’t expect me to be particularly impressed by a (mostly) photorealistic composition just because you spent 30 minutes fine-tuning your prompt. If I’m not appreciating your skill and the time you committed to your vision, the bar for the impact you need to make is that much higher. For me, most AI art falls flat on that front as well.
Maybe someone will be the breakthrough artist that shows the rest of us luddites what a genuinely beautiful interplay between drafting a prompt and massaging an engine will look like, but (1) even that person is something other than a painter or a photographer, and (2) I don’t think we’re there yet and may never be.
That is at least reasonable. I really don’t expect you to be impressed by anybody’s efforts in AI prompting. Calling it not-art is subjectively wrong, but not being impressed is right in most cases.
art - the expression or application of human creative skill and imagination
Not-art is subjectively right. AI “art” is made by taking imagery and reassembling it according to an algorithm. There’s no thought, no imagination, no anything creative behind it. Can it be aesthetically pleasing? Sure, like a sunset can be. But neither are art because there’s no intention behind it.
Where is this definition from? Somewhere official, or your own personal definition?
Is a picture of a sunset art? If the photographer chose a particularly scenic view and took several pictures before deciding on the one they felt was best, is that not art? Does the photographer have to, personally, hike to find the vantage point and take the picture for it to be art? Can they use a drone instead? How about just feeds from a camera someone set up? If the person looks through a feed and takes some high quality screenshots of a particularly vivid sunset that moves them, and decides to frame it and display it, is it disqualified from being art because they didn’t create the sunset and just selected the image from a series of images they were looking at? Is it slop if they decide to digitally remove a tree that was blocking the view?
This is the problem I have. Every argument against AI art inevitably closes the door against some other form of art that the arguer would otherwise consider acceptable. I know you’re not going to like or accept this answer, but the reason it’s so hard to have an argument that only applies to AI art and not any other forms of art is because AI art IS art.
It’s art, because art is subjective. The moment you start trying to define it or gatekeep it, the meaning will slip through your fingers like grains of sand.
Is a picture of a sunset art?
Yes, IF the photographer chose the framing, angle, lighting etc. of the picture. If it was randomly taken by a drone or if someone just thrust out a camera and started blindly taking pictures, that’s not art. UNLESS the person was trying to make some sort of statement about how randomly taken pictures look. Again, it’s all about intent more than the actual composition. There has to be some sort of underlying idea that’s being expressed. AI cannot have ideas.
I’ll answer each of the questions because I find thinking about it interesting:
If the photographer chose a particularly scenic view and took several pictures before deciding on the one they felt was best, is that not art?
Yes, explained above.
Does the photographer have to, personally, hike to find the vantage point and take the picture for it to be art?
No. They can take any picture they have specifically chosen to take the way they took it.
Can they use a drone instead?
Yes. The method used doesn’t matter, the fact that they chose the picture to look the way is does is what matters.
How about just feeds from a camera someone set up?
If they stopped it at a certain point and chose that framing for a reason, not random chance, then yes.
If the person looks through a feed and takes some high quality screenshots of a particularly vivid sunset that moves them, and decides to frame it and display it, is it disqualified from being art because they didn’t create the sunset and just selected the image from a series of images they were looking at?
This one is a really good question if the video feed is presumed to be an automated one not shot by a person and was not set up to capture the sunset or anything in particular. There was no intent behind the images being captured, it’s just a recording of what things looked like in a specific place at a specific time. Yet a person could choose one of these random images and decide they liked the composition. Would the aesthetically pleasing image being hung on a wall be art? Well, would a seashell chosen from a beach for its appearance and put on display be art? I would say no, the picture or seashell themselves both qualify as decorations, not art. However, their chosen placement in a space is a form of art. So AI generated images (or anything at all, really) could be made into a component of art even if the individual parts are not themselves art.
Is it slop if they decide to digitally remove a tree that was blocking the view?
Totally depends on how extensive the change is if AI is creating the image where the tree used to be.
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People using prompts are not “making” art. They are hallucinating theft from actual artists. There never was any skill or materials gate. Pen or pencil and a scrap of paper, pick it up and start. There is no defense for AI “art” or the shills that push it.
If you use summary tools on google to make you a list or a paragraph you’re ripping off actual writers and stealing their collective style. (Language models don’t just come from nowhere after all) Spell check is ok, but if you write like you’re borderline illiterate, well, pick up a grammar book and a notepad and get cracking. Hire a professional editor to plan your next set of PowerPoint slides.
Sheesh.
There is nothing new under the sun, even artists who draw their own stuff learn from other artists and use it in their art. AI training isn’t theft as long as the art is free to look at, that is just sour grapes. Torrenting anything and using it either as inspiration for your own work, or for training AI is theft and shouldn’t be done by anybody, but especially not corporations. Either way, it isn’t the training that is theft.
Prompting does not make anything, it is like saying you cooked a meal because you picked it in a vending machine.
It is more like writing a recipee down and giving it to a chef who uses their skill to interpret the recipe and make a new dish. The dish doesn’t belong wholly to the chef, despite the skill nearly wholly residing with the chef. The person who wrote the recipee isn’t a chef, but they are involved in making the dish that was their idea.
Yeah but we don’t say “I made these cookies” when all we did was hand someone the recipe, now do we?
No, because telling someone or something to make something doesn’t mean we get to say we made it.
So you are saying that the person who made the recipe had no input to the process of cooking the resultant food? Nobody claims they “drew” something when they design an AI prompt. When you see a Frank Lloyd Write building do you say, "Nah he didn’t build that, he just made some plans. A contractor built it. Frank Lloyd Write isn’t an artist, he is just a prompt writer. "
Don’t break your arm patting yourself on the back for putting an order in at the restaurant. That chef would make something with or without you.
Lmao about you trying to compare ai prompters to Frank Lloyd Write, when he actually did the design work and you can’t.
Oh, sorry, you’re right, prompters never say they drew something, they just claim to be artists when they clearly aren’t. Should’ve figured you’d nitpick word choices it’s about the only think you’re capable of.
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Found the tool!
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I don’t like ai-art, most of the time it is a pursuit of the economic value of an aesthetic without a genuine engagement with the human part.
Further, AI is part of a broad process of dehumanization that diminishes the value of humans and the human condition in favor of an imagined intelligence that all artists have always instinctually understood was a threat.
No artists with any wisdom at all thinks skill is a gatekeeper for human artists, skill is rather the inveitable result of a sustained intimacy between an artist and their art and what you mistake for a worship of skill is a love of that relationship framed in the context of skill. In so far as the obsession with artistic skill acts as a gatekeeper to anybody, it is in large part because capitalism demands things be abstracted and reduced to pure economic value. Artists rarely gatekeep art themselves, the gatekeeping has NOTHING to do with artists nor does it originate from their desire to create art it is a peripheral process imposed upon art by distorting forces attempting to control art (such as AI).
Also, people need to stop lazily using the example of Luddites without knowing their history. They aren’t who you think they were, stop dropping the reference like you know what it means if you don’t know what it means.
TL;DR If skill is a gatekeeper to art it is because capitalism demands scarcity be imposed upon the pursuit of making art, it has nothing to do with art itself. Hailing AI as a gift to would-be artists totally misses the point, I am not against using new tools to make art, I am against the rise in dehumanization dominating societies around the world at the moment of which AI is a central actor.
Walther Benjamin examines this point extensively in The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction, which should be required reading for everyone, but especially anyone who thinks that AI art is the same as human art. The crux is that an authentic work (you can think of it as the “original”) has some… thing , some Je ne sais quoi that he calls the Aura. It’s a feeling you get from the real authentic thing. It’s the reason people line up at the Louvre to see the tiny Mona Lisa behind thick plate glass instead of just looking at a poster. Or why NFTs tried to be a thing and basically failed after the meme of it all died out.
Growing up my mother had (still has come to think of it) a book about Wyeth at the Kuerner family farm. The Wyeth picture in the Oatmeal story is not part of the larger collection of works all from that farm, but it still has the feeling. I can’t reccomend people looking into Wyeth and his art high enough
Unexpected mention of Allie Brosh in the thanks at the end. Genuinely nice to be able to confirm she’s still out there, alive and kicking, doing whatever it is she’s doing now.
She wrote a book a couple years back that explains where she vanished to. It’s good.
She’s written a couple, at least. Þe two I have are boþ good.
AI art is great, because now I can make artsy pictures in my presentations. AI art can never replace real artists though, it’s just not that good. There will always be a place for real artists, AI art is only for amateurs that would never pay for real art anyways.
Enjoy making Clipart Storyteller.
Or where hiring an actual real artists - for example if you were to need dozens of graphics for, say, a TTRPG you’re running.
On the other hand, if you’re e.g. writing your own TTRPG, and getting it published, you ought to use a real artist.
IMO the best way to determine if AI is okay to use or not, is by the purpose - is it a personal project, something you won’t profit off? Then sure. Is it something you’re going to profit off of? Then use a real artist and include them in the profits.
Or where hiring an actual real artists - for example if you were to need dozens of graphics for, say, a TTRPG you’re running.
The only issue with that is that the AI was trained off the art from people who did create art for their TTRPG either paid or as a passion project.
Does that mean that new art effectively stops getting made for these scenarios? That real artists who are inspired to make cool art for their games just disappear or get assumed it was just AI?
I kind of wonder if we just stagnate from here, with very little new art being created that doesn’t come from AI. In 10 years will we still be using the long recycled art from the last human artists? (Not that humans will stop creating art, but less will and they will often be drowned out from the flood of AI output)
Very, very few TTRPG sessions have artists creating art for each of them. Mine certainly didn’t before I could run genAI models locally. At most I’d grab generic, CC-licenced ambiance art, or, if the group had an artistic veined person, they’d help out with some character sheet art and such.
AI took no jobs here. And as I said, if the art is for something you profit off of, you should use an actual artist.
I’m not talking about jobs, just people who do art for fun. Before AI there was still a lot of D&D fan art for example. Tons of people drawing their character or getting a commission done of the party after a long campaign. That kind of thing.
I think AI art has a negative impact on that sort of expression. People who might have tried it instead just generate something instead, never learning they really like to draw. People who would’ve commissioned something now can just generate a pic instead. People who had fun sharing fan art lose their motivation because for every one picture they complete, 1000s of AI images bury their art so it never gets appreciated.
I think this can be summarised as “fair use”, something the AI providers like OpenAi could learn a thing or two about.
One of the best minis in a game I was in that was ever used was a hydra made out of paper, and when we killed a head, the dm pulled one out of the slots and it was a bloody stump drawn at the base of the neck. Everyone at the table flipped their shit, it was awesome.
If the dm just used ai to make something, that wouldn’t have happened. It would’ve been disappointing to find out if was an ai image for the players, and he wouldn’t have made that fun memory.
AI takes away potential in more ways than one.
Wow. Way to be ignorant.
I’m not disagreeing that said mini scene isn’t epic, but AI literally doesn’t take away from such events - in fact it can help make them happen.
There’s tons of people out there (including myself) who have the mental/cerebral creativity, but lack the ability to translate it to something hand-drawn. To take my own example further, I can’t draw for shit - and this isn’t for lack of trying, mind you, I’ve spent 4 years in an architectural high school, each year having 2-4 weekly freehand drawing classes, and while I can manage more regular objects in perspective… that’s about it. On the other hand, I’m really good with CAD in general, or mechanical drawings. To me AI isn’t something that takes away my creativity, or replaces the human element, because I know what I want on-screen, and simply require an aid, a tool, to make that happen.
With my TTRPG games (which are more sci-fi oriented), I still do 90% of the prep by hand. I plan ahead for the possible paths my players will take, generate backdrops to be used on my projector, and recently even started generating background music to play.
Even if I was a “real artist”, the amount of work required to eliminate AI from the workflow is simply not doable by a single person.
But yet again, it doesn’t take away from my creativity. I still have to come up with the scenarios, the possible outcomes, how my players might react, plan the backdrops and music and battle scenes and whatnot, and have everything I’ve envisioned, translated into something my players can see.
AI isn’t providing the creativity, but a way to translate the vision to visual.
That’s really sad that you think that way and telling that you missed the point.
If you hand make something for your game, during the creation process you’ll have a hydra moment and make something different than your initial idea. If you just use AI then you stay with that initial idea and don’t explore it. So yeah, it does take away from your creativity and you don’t even realize it.
I guarantee you that if you actually made something yourself for your campaign your players would like it much more than the AI stuff.
Because the big secret of artists? Stuff never turns out as good as it was in your head. Not once. And it’s not supposed to.
With the same attitude one could campaign for ditching digital art tools, hell, even paint and paper, and going back all the way to cave paintings.
AI is a tool, period. Using it does not denigrate the process, and no, unlike your claim, does not take away from creativity, in fact it can trigger the exact same new ideas other creative processes can.
What’s truly sad is that you, in complete lack of understanding of how and why AI can be used, are dismissing not just AI but people who use it, putting your ideology of “art purism” as something superior. My recommendation is, you look back in history and see how every single technological advancement that resulted in such outcries and purist movements, has ended up. Small hint: you’re very much on the wrong side of things.
Heh, AI is about as much of a tool as a drive through window is to cooking. You aren’t making anything, you’re not part of the process, you’re having a computer copy someone else’s choices and spill it out for you. This isn’t like a camera where people make choices with lenses, lighting and framing, this is you giving up your creative agency because you want a picture and don’t care how you got it.
Ai images aren’t art, and it’s sad that you think they are.
Ah, so you’ve been debating in bad faith all along.
off you fuck then, troll.
