I'd suggest people learn about Andy Warhol's factory where they mass produced "art."

Ditto for Picasso, and many artists even going back to the Renaissance when great painters and sculptors sometimes had apprentices finish or duplicate paintings/sculptures for them.

But this isn't that. AI is something else entirely.

I don't recommend using the Warhol argument. It's become a trope used by AI-über-alles people who have little knowledge of and often zero experience in the arts.

> What they care about are authors' moral rights. If the model was trained without obtaining permission from the authors of every work in the training data, they think using the model to create art is immoral.

Art is not created in isolation. It is a result of the artist's exposure (aka training), both intentional and incidental. If an artist wants an AI model to get permission before training on their work, then the artist should get permission from all the artists they were exposed to that shaped their artistic expression.

It's training and copying all the way down.

AI generative art doesn't exist by definition. You cannot generate art. Actually we have a term for this - kitsch.

I don't think it did take that long actually? And I don't think it's even a good comparison. AI art vs human art isn't the same jump as physical media to digital.

Honestly I'm okay with "AI art" becoming a category. The issue is when it's presented as handmade, causing confusion.

Digital artwork being presenting at an oil painting conference would cause similar confusion and outrage for the same reasons.

There was also a brief moment where digital art wasn't cheating as long as you didn't use layers and the clipboard.

This too will pass. Soon everything is going to be rendered at 60hz in real time, and demands that everything needs to be rendered by hand will be as absurd as claiming every frame of a 3D game needs to be hand rendered in Photoshop.

I remember this as well, but I also remember those who thought that merely expressed their disapproval.

This time around the response as been aggressively adversarial. Not only do they disapprove of the new thing but anyone who express a contrary opinion is considered a target.

Yeah. The problem is that AI images are widely considered uncool, like hyper uncool. That's it.

"I can vouch for myself and others - that we are there to just buy cool shit and not ‘connect’ with the artist."

Who is "we"? Art, to me, is about pouring your heart and soul into something in a way that AI can trivially emulate, which makes it dangerous when placed next to art that actually has a lived experience attached to it.

I can slap a prompt into AI and get some graphic design slop that to the untrained eye looks "close enough" to the vendor next to them that actually made the art themselves. This is dangerous and spits in the face of people who pour themselves into their work.

At best, put the AI art generators into their own little special corner. But don't put one-shotted AI art next to actual crafted human created art right next to one another and say that they're equal. The brush strokes are imaginary. That's a grift.

You could save yourself some time and jingle keys in front of your face.

> But it's not really a question of style if you misspell certain words.

Sure it is. Flagging vernacular, phonetic spelling for accents, punning, signalling a character's use of a word they are unfamiliar with, and so on and so forth. Intentionally misspelling words can definitely be a stylistic choice.

Maybe a linter is a more accurate allegory. I think there are parts of art that could sometimes be suggested in terms of anatomy, symmetry, shading, color theory, etc. You'd configure your art linter to your preferences/style (or target style) and it would point out the things you're doing wrong and offer suggested fixes.

You could argue red and blue squiggles have been nudging us that way for a few decades.

Photography, computer graphics, Photoshop, synthesizers, samplers, and others have all been considered "not real art."

The irony is that the kind of genre art you see at Comic-Con is mostly reproductions of commercial properties or standard tropes and formulas, with very little original vision and creativity. Being able to draw something recognisable as [genre character name goes here], even with some skill, is not that high a bar, and it lives in a tiny niche in the art world as a whole.

AI brought something fresh to art for a while, but now I think creative people are more aware of the limitations. It's in a strange mid-way place between being fascinating, and being frustratingly limited compared to what it could be.

I suspect we'll start seeing meta-art soon with a much more interesting mix of creation, original thought, and execution.

Thing is, image generators might be better than when SD came out years ago, there's been zero progress on actually meaningfully integrating AI into artists' workflow.

The problem is AI assisted art does not yet exist the same way you can get an LLM to help you finish a project you started by hand, where you can arbitrarily decide how much control you want to exercise over the output.

“Good” is some mix of taste and skill.

People without taste hide behind skill. They do everything technically correctly and still make something bad. This is the threat of new mediums to them — it takes away their only strength.

But at the same time, something like AI suddenly enables people with neither taste nor skill to produce. I don’t want to see AI art right now — AI art is currently a lot of noise.

The sentiment of photography not being real art hasn’t been a thing for a while now though.

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Try https://vizcom.ai, it might be closer to what you are looking for.

I think the effort is indeed a big piece of it. For example, consider sports. I don't imagine that a lot of sports fans would be interested in watching completely AI-generated video of their favorite teams playing, even if it's totally believable. Surely the main point of the whole thing has something to do with humans at the top of their skill, measuring up against each other, and experiencing it together with them?

For me it's the same with music. I am sure I will be fooled by some AI generated music now and then, but what does that prove?

That's a bit different than art. I put it closer to "why do you care if your girlfriend is AI or real? Isn't it just the end emotions you care about?". There is a deep human connection to art, creativity, expression of human emotions and feelings. Reading a poem about losing a loved one and connecting with it, only to find out it was written by a machine is a deep betrayal of that. Its like finding out the love letter you got in school was actually a mockery by the person you had a crush on -- what does it matter? the letter made you feel good right, and that's all you were after. It matters because intention and emotion of other humans matters to most people.

Not everything is purely about being able to output a product and/or produce a tangible good or service. Some things are about people and how people feel.

Another example. I run a charity that takes money, but just generates AI videos simulating helping children. What does it matter? Ultimately the person donating just wants to feel like they made a difference, and they get the same feeling either way, believing the money is well spent. It matters because no one is really being helped, no virtue is actually being enacted in the world.

In the same way, generating all our art and music from AI would represent a massive harm in the world -- effectively extinguishing massive portions of human creativity, and all the people who get to feel useful in creating, editing, and distributing it. In a cold capitalist view, what does it matter, I just want to see a pretty picture for a moment. In terms of actual real value in the world, it is negative and selfish, assuming the only value is my temporary enjoyment of product.

The thing is, all of those are valid ways to manufacture things and they each have their merits and values.

There is no problem with using hand tools, power tools or CNC.

The problem is people looking down on the others.

Of course the path you chose is a more pure reperestation of your values. That"s why you chose it.

I was speaking to an upholsterer yesterday and he was saying that using foam as stuffing is cheating.

We also typically value things that are not tied to productivity/output, like product quality/reliability, security, and our own agency.

I want to be free to read, write, run, and share code, now and in the future. Relying on centralized services to do it for me (by extracting knowledge from countless other people) is certainly not a resilient strategy.

>Not to say that coding doesn't have those two, but I'd argue developers have been caring less and less for it over the years.

I think this is both hindsight bias and survivorship bias.

There has always been massive buckets of buggy shit code out there. Now, one thing we had in the past was very tight computing limitations that worked as a decent evolutionary death function. As computing resources grew, the selection function became less effective and we get to see these hulking crap monsters lumber around our CPUs.

I can listen to music and recognize the artist or a singer’s voice. It doesn’t mean as much without that relationship. Depending on the style of music some of the charm is in production imperfections or sloppy playing that brings a distinctly human quality to it.

Is the backlash among gamers to AI code or to AI-made visuals / assets, which are often kind of sloppy or nonsensical if looked at closely? I had only heard about the latter.

> We are seeing pushback on games developed using AI.

Yes, people whine but still buy the games, as long as they're fun. Expressed preference of "AI is always bad" vs revealed preference of "It's fine if the product is still good."

>As such, their work and livelihoods OUGHT to be more important and more deserving of protectionism.

FTFY.

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The art world is plagued not by subjectivity but an erroneous compulsion to treat subjectivity as objectivity.

This isn't a "gotcha" experiment, it's a real question. And the problem with "I know it when I see it" is that right now people are biasing towards "if it's good it must be AI" and accusing legit artists and writers of being AI.

I happened to me. I spent 10 minutes writing a reddit comment. I researched it, I sourced it. It had sections with headlines, bullets, and even em dashes. 100% written by me.

As soon as I posted it, it was downvoted and I got PMs saying "don't post this AI slop!".

The problem is the AI has been trained on well executed material, and when you execute well, you look like an AI.

Clair Obscur: Expedition 33 (recently game of the year) got caught leaving a small amount of placeholder AI content in their game and everyone lost their mind

I’m sure reasonable artists agree with you, but many today do not

> But if you worked at a fantasy publishing house and commissioned a cover painting, it might take a fair amount of work for you to get the artist to create something in line with what you envisioned.

If you do this infrequently, you're a commissioner of work.

If you do it daily, in-house, for your own products... you might just have the title "Art Director."

The main argument artists use isn’t that it is taking their job. The problem is that it was trained on their work without their consent and without compensation. This is fundamentally different from a Wordpress or squarespace and arguably different from models trained on open source software only.

I see that as being partially true. There will be people like Walter Keane that take the art of others and state it is their own work. [0] AI will assist those individuals.

AI will have a home on people's desktops for those that accept it.

Art that has value will not be AI art. Artist like Margaret Keane will continue to be viewed as exceptional along with their works. [1]

Personally, I view AI art as lacking passion and an attempt to short circuit the path to profit / greed. I wish to not fund that circuit.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Walter_Keane

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Margaret_Keane

Well I think we're just describing taste and craft. AI tools will get better, more granular, and become better integrated into the actual workflows of people over time. A good tool shouldn't take over my sense for taste and craft.

It's a good thing people are pushing back against the slop if we want there to be any incentives for AI tools to not be geared towards helping make slop.

It's funny you chose that as your example, because there are very strict definitions of when day becomes night. I think what you were looking for was "when does someone become bald" or "when does an acorn become a tree".

There is a reason those are classic philosophical questions. Because they highlight the fact that while it is easy to identify the ends of the spectrum, it's impossible to find the midpoint, because everyone has a different lived experience.

When you say "Art" can only come from a person who drew a line directly with their own hand, vs. a person who told a computer to draw a line, it's false scarcity. Both lines could wind up looking identical, but the Artist is trying to make the world believe only one of those lines is truly valuable.

I'd be interested to see you expand your comment beyond what you wrote. I don't have a horse in this race, I'm a terrible Artist and have no interest in using my time to create visual baubles with AI. I just see it as an interesting thing that is playing out.

They are only religious about it because it hurts their bottom line.

And on top of those things, I'd add that good artists use that time to deepen the work and their understanding of the work.

If you're doing, say, factory work, you can just zone out. You do the same thing over and over, and you do it well enough, but your mind is somewhere else.

But somebody who's truly during art is present in the work as they're doing it. They're up to something. I think that's a big part of why the work of serious artists changes over time. It's an exploration.

In contrast, look at some kitch producer like Thomas Kinkade, Painter of Light™. He was clearly successful financially. But I'd argue that there is little more to it than "AI" "art".

For me appreciating art always involves reaching for an understanding of the artist and the humanity we share. An Ansel Adams print is lovely, but ultimately I end up thinking not just about the image or the landscape. I think about being in the landscape. About the process of getting that one perfect photo. About what drives a person to seek that and to go to such incredible lengths. About how Adams saw the world.

If I'm going to think hard about some GenAI output, I'm going to appreciate the technology that went into it. But there's no more to think about the prompter than there is about somebody picking out clip art.

How to you estimate the 'time and skill' that went into the creation of a random piece of art? Is a portrait that took 50 hours to paint inherently more worthy than a virtually identical one that took 5 hours? Is the slower artist the better artist? Is a Bob Ross 'happy little trees, body of water, mountain in background'-image not artistically valuable because he does it in 20 minutes?

As for skill: I would argue that a random Banksy takes a lot less skill than the average Artemisia Gentileschi (admit it: you had to look her up). Yet, one is celebrated art, the other is virtually unknown and at best 'one among many baroque northern-Italian painters'.

Those are earnest questions, I want to understand the recently-recurring time-and-skill argument. What sort of people honestly look at a picture and ask 'yes, but how long did it take to make? How long had the artist to be trained for this?'