Of all the unsettling nonsense here, those teeth are just horrifying. Although the toe-fingers are a close second.
It’s sad to see so many people saying that AI generated pictures are art. At the end of the day, if you don’t get why art is important, you don’t get it. Gonna be hard to explain to Elon’s fans why the human aspect of art matters, so why bother?
This is a pretty complex topic, as a quick knee jerk I agree AI art isn’t art in the common sense, but one thing I disagree with is that all art has intent or even needs it.
I don’t think AI art is going to or even tries to replace art as a creative pursuit. If anything it’s more likely to replace certain photography related jobs.
Currently the main use cases are
- Generating stock photos
- Generating texture maps
- Generating concept art
None of these things really care about intent, you could argue concept art does, but a lot of the time it’s just there to set a vibe/direction/theme. All of the above will still replace jobs but not the typical everyday artists jobs, maybe stock or texture photographers though.
I think AI art is comparable to photography. Photographers do a lot of work behind the scenes to get everything set up, the equipment, lighting, angles, lenses, etc, But at the end of the day, the only action they’re taking to capture the art is they press a button, it’s not nearly the same amount of work that a painter or a musician puts into their art. So I think the idea of “capturing” art is still a valid thing. Sometimes a photographer can capture an award-winning masterpiece with a spur-of-the-moment photo on some shitty disposable camera. Maybe it took them 1000 bad photos to get that one photo, but they still just captured it from somewhere else, they didn’t create the work.
Similarly with AI, a person may have to work with the AI software to setup and craft the prompt that will eventually generate the art, then there may be dozens of iterations of that and fine-tuning to get the result they’re imagining, and even after that there may be some photoshopping involved to get it to where they want it. They’re capturing artwork from a source that may not be their own creation, just the same as photographers. I think AI art is just as legitimate as other forms of art, it’s just open to a wider range of people that can participate because many of the physical hurdles (equipment, space, time, lighting, etc) are not as much of an issue.
AI “art” is theft. Doesn’t matter how much time they spend setting up the perfect prompt. It’s not their viewpoint. It’s not their aesthetic or style. They made no decision to go one direction or another. It’s an aggregate of someone ( or many someones) else’s work.
I think, where the real conflict comes from, is that most traditional artists are passionate about their craft and need to be able to sell their commodity art. Most people are empathetic of that and therefore not a fan of other commodity art competing with these passionate artists.
Photography was also controversial when it first appeared, because it meant traditional artists could hardly sell portraits and realistic paintings anymore.
I think, it also took a while for people to learn of and believe that some people are actually genuinely passionate about photography, too.And well, AI is now the new thing, but it’s also kind of worse. Because it’s not just certain kinds of paintings that are affected, they’ve literally been trained to replace all commodity art.
And they’re stealing off of those traditional artists (someone snapping a photograph of the Mona Lisa and trying to sell it as art will also get heckled).
And it’s going to be hard to convince people that typing words into a box is something to be passionate about.It’s a tool in a box. Maybe an artist can use it get some inspiration and not actually use any of the generated images. Or generate a backdrop for their portrait drawing. Or generate a composition they like and then draw over it.
Photography is capturing something real in the physical world. Even if the action can be boiled down to “push a button” the photographer needs to have at least some presence where the real event is taking place.
AI art is not a depiction of a real event and requires no physical presence. It’s also not being brought to life by the person taking credit for it. That’s not to say AI generated images can’t be cool or useful but I don’t think they are art. If your definition of art is loose enough to apply to AI generated images then the I think the artist credit should belong to the AI itself or the team that wrote the software, not the person typing in prompts.
It’s because you don’t understand their vision – classic idea guy redux
I kinda feel the same at times with 3d printing. I can make you rare parts or plastic piece for an appliance from scratch with my hands. I can make you a cosplay suit of armor from scratch out of foam and it’ll end up looking like iron man armour. Then a guy does the same thing in a printer and goes to me “I made this on my own” and I stare at him.
Almost as bad as a banana taped to the wall.
