51–60 of 79 posts
I haven't found any particularly good courses, however I do enjoy this YouTuber, who covers Midjourney and some other generators:
https://www.youtube.com/@WadeMcMaster
The key thing you should try to do is this: make them understand that genAI is a toolset, akin to Photoshop.
[flagged]
It seems like your post is mostly based on assumptions about the poster, and a misreading(?) of this one word.
There’s no hubris in wanting to assuage people’s fears that their skills might become obsolete.
> The important part of art is the practice and the transformation that occurs in the creator.
They claim to be engaging (talking to friends) to the extent that they can be without already being a working artist. Maybe they are lying, but all we have is a post on the Internet, so if we assume the author of the post is a liar, we don’t have much to go by.
> You will never understand this unless you engage. Trying to circumvent it again and again will only result in circumambulating the point and will miss it every time. No matter how shiny the artifact that results.
Do you actually work in art? I don’t. But what do you mean by engage? I’ve taken some art classes. It was fun. But this was a cultivated experience, I was paying the instructor to have fun and explore ideas.
On the other hand, you can poke around online and find people who will complain about the day-to-day bullshit of their art jobs. I worry that, almost by definition, the easy paths to engagement are almost by-definition not going to give a good view of what the day-to-day bullshit experience looks like.
People romanticize engineering and programming as well. The beauty of getting a tangible solution, sprung from your mind, that impacts the world. At the end of the day, a lot of houses and dinners were bought by the need to throw together boring assed corporate inventory management systems.
Most work is the sort of stuff that nobody wants to do, after all. That’s why they pay you for it, rather than going the other way.
[flagged]
Oh, you didn't read the whole post. I'd recommend you do, it'd help with understanding and replying.
> , rather than pressuring your friends to join you in yours?
The OP is literally saying they're asking.
There are more constructive ways of engaging.
Let's try something simple.
Have you ever used a pre-existing piece as part of your composition? Would it matter if that was not created manually?
What's the least creative part of what you do, are there any bland things you could fill in (e.g. paint these clouds or grass for me).
Earlier quoted context omitted.
"In all views". "It will do everything and I will need to say nothing". Those are the pretentious parts of your reply. It's just not true that everyone feels that practicing art is the main point. Sure, it can be developmental for an individual.
Tell me, why dont you “drill down” and explain what is so pretentious about suggesting you might need to commit yourself to a practice in order to understand it. A pencil and paper are far cheaper and more accessible than a laptop and online subscriptions to “gen ai platform of the month”. As I said elsewhere, if you think the artifact is all that matters then you are lost. And I have better things to do than get mir…
A person who has become accustomed to taking an engineering (or yes, unfortunately enough, a marketing) approach throughout their life may be more naturally drawn to a process that appeals to them rather than one that is unfamiliar. Especially as they grow older and their way of the world solidifies, since up to that point that mindset has served them well in their usual non-art domain.
I will be the first to say that I do not consider genAI as "art" in the traditional sense. And that the two approaches are not, and will never be, equivalent for the reasons of personal self-development outlined elsewhere in this thread. At the same time, I did do as you say and spent a lot of time and effort on analogue pencil/ink on paper drawing for a year and a half in rebellion to this genAI commodification of everything. I did a few free tutorials but in general just tried to sit down somewhere and draw anything, free of any boundaries or restrictions, to keep my mind on drawing.
After months and months of it, on a near daily basis, I just lost interest. I didn't have a strong drive to get really good beyond what I considered chicken scratches.
Now of course you could say something like I needed to spend more effort instead of stopping that early not truly understanding the process of drawing, but to me it feels like fitting a square peg into a round hole. It's about different people having a different alignment of interests. For example I find music processing tools like pure data far more interesting than anything related to pen-on-paper, and have created a lot of things with them (without any AI involvement), arguably rather artistic things, in a shorter timeframe, because I enjoyed it more than drawing. Likely because those systems feel more like engineering to me.
So in my opinion, some portion of the people insisting on genAI's superiority as an approach (completely the wrong thing to say IMO) in reality wouldn't have had much interest in creating art perhaps for the rest of their lives if genAI hadn't been invented at all. GenAI to those people is an indicator of how invested they are in art/personal reflection/growth, etc. Which is: not much, in comparison to other things. But to them that's fine. And it wouldn't have been much different without genAI, only you wouldn't have heard of all those people in an art-world context 6 years ago anyway - save for something perspective-altering like psychedelics, maybe.
And this also applies between domains within art as well. A person's interest in digital painting may never reach the same level as that of EDM production. And some portion of those hypothetical EDM producers will, unfortunately or not, discover a way of reclaiming the leftover time for their less-important hobbies in smashing a button 10 times.
When the bar has been lowered so low that someone can push a button and have a flurry of artifact imitations spit out, people will be naturally curious for at least a short time. When a few of them also realize that this places the domain of "art" (for whichever faulty or not definition they started with) into an engineering realm involving all sorts of sparkly bits like k-diffusion methods and LoRAs and UNets and activation functions and such, it's not surprising that some engineering-minded people would think to themselves "oh, this can become my way of expressing myself." However flawed that reasoning may be.
[flagged]
[flagged]
So if you make your art for "you", why should I care about it? If this is how artists feel then bring on the AI.
I reckon there are some hurdles to overcome before seeing a lot of non-technical generative AI imaging uptake among advanced and professional artists. A) most of these tools UIs aren’t useful to traditional artists in any part of the direct creation process yet, B) the prompt-based workflow, conceptually, doesn’t fit into traditional art processes so it’s essentially starting from scratch, and C) some vocal denizens of the DIY NN scene have done a fine job of making it as unappealing as possible to traditional artists.
I know plenty of artists— both commercial artists and professional fine artists— that use simpler generative tools like midjourney for mood boards, reference, etc. but don’t know a single one that directly uses the output to make art.
One big problem is that the UIs of all local stable diffusion front ends are not designed for people to make art— they’re designed for people to operate a neural network image generator. From a technical perspective, that’s the same thing, but from an interface design perspective, it is a very different goal, and it shows. For people that are enamored with the technology, or for people with a technical background that are used to wielding a bunch of abstract acronyms and don’t have to build up a bunch of base knowledge, that’s great. For people that just want to express themselves and already have another way to do so, it’s a huge, annoying impediment. (And while it’s done with the best of intentions (usually,) assuming non-technical artists will be as enriched by the technical knowledge and tools much as technical people without art expertise comes across as pretty conceited.)
Another problem is that getting an image generator to create things in a way that makes sense in a normal artistic process is difficult. Art, generally, is about building things from broad stroke base to the finest finishing details with direct, granular control, and deciding/discovering what that finished piece will look like while you go, with all of the kismet and happy accidents that go with that process. You don’t usually make huge changes after you’ve polished it up because you probably wouldn’t have gotten that far with an element that didn’t work. When you start with something that has all of the “finished product” detail implemented already, that entire process is turned upside down. It’s distracting. Think about the way Bob Ross worked his way through a painting— do you think he would even want a workflow where he used words to describe a completed painting and then decided things he wanted to change about it? Not being an artist, encountering that tool is incredibly freeing. When you’ve put a bunch of time and practice into figuring out how to wield that artistic perspective and then use the tools you prefer to build and develop your visions from raw ingredients, it’s restrictive, disorienting. The thing you’ve been organically growing into for years that makes your art yours— the way you make basic shapes, flicks of the pencils or brush, ways that you might subconsciously separate tiny little background elements from each other, all of which are equally applicable with digital tools— is missing from this piece and has been replaced with an amalgam of many other artists hands. That’s the reason many people like generative image stuff: you don’t have to understand all of the tiny little components that make a piece what it is and just think about the objects and comparatively very-broad-stroke style. You’ve lost the verbs and adverbs from your process and are left only with nouns and adjectives.
Also, while obviously not representative of the user base on a whole, the active, vocal community of stans that can’t distinguish between Reddit and the rest of their interactions have done a great job of alienating traditional artists. Their gleefully predicting the obsolescence of traditional artists— using tools built with their work without permission, no less — makes it tough to tap into that excitement. A lot of us have mouths to feed, mortgages to pay, and cancer to treat, and while many disciplines are not as vulnerable as many think, people like concept artists are actively being screwed over because tech money decided they want to get paid for our hard-won skills instead of artists. This alone makes it a tougher sell than it should be.
That’s the point of generative AI, though, isn’t it? You put in text, you get out an image, no more need for discernment or skill or labor. No amount of explanation of vector math will change the fact that article headers can now be generated from the article, or you can say “give me a spaceman on a planet looking at twin moons” and a Steam game header is generated with some basic cropping. Incidental and corporate a…
This sentiment is reminiscent to the attitudes around photography when it first became practical. People wondered how photography could be considered a form of art when all one had to do was point and press a button. The amount of effort is minuscule compared to what it takes to depict the same subject using traditional media. That being said, there is a lot of skill necessary to capture a photograph properly; lighting, composition, shutter speed, exposure, and so on. I agree that generative AI images will disrupt the market segment for stock photos and "clip art" used for articles, presentations, et cetera.
There will be a need to study and acquire skills related to the use of generative AI image creation. While technology will make simple prompts "good enough" for most outputs, just as our smartphone cameras make taking a picture "good enough", people will still need to study and practice in order to make high quality output.
[flagged]
Sorry, but graphic designers (who are the group of artists most affected by genAI) don't think this way, and I have a hard time believing you're actually interacting with any and discussing this issue, because this take is what I'll call "the trendy online anti AI art" viewpoint. In the real world, graphic designers are pretty pragmatic people that tend to master whatever toolset they can get their hands on.
I notice a lot of non-professional artists running to the rescue of artists. I suspect this is in part because there are a lot of young people who have pursued a degree in art and have been frustrated by the mismatch of their expectations in the commercial world. There is a lot of romanticism.
I myself went to art school (MFA). Actually I was really grossed out by the big Art gallery scene. It professes to be open minded, anti establishment and non commercial but it is extremely narrow in politics, hugely elitist and deeply oriented around big money. That’s ok, but I wouldn’t claim that Art has any moral superiority.