As an artist I am concerned about AI image generation

I'm pretty unimpressed with the stuff coming out of Dall-E etc (I know, controversial opinion on HN, but bear with me). It's technically impressive, but imho, it still hasn't closed an essential gap need to make AI truly compelling, and still feels like just a modern ELIZA: simultaneously impressive given the technology and a parlor trick.

That said, I'm also not too impressed with many contemporary "artists", especially the type this person is afraid of being replaced with AI.

What I see here is that artists that have turned themselves into art making robots are vulnerable to being replaced by robots that are making art.

As a counter example I present the work of Ben Kovach [0], a generative artist, who makes art with robots essentially. All of his work is generated from computer programs but there are many (and certainly not all) pieces that capture a genuine sense of art that I have not seen in either the slew of human artists churning out robotic work to satisfy customer demand or current generation AI generated art.

Kovach's work reminds me of the work of Factory Record's designer Peter Saville, probably most famous for the cover of Joy Division's Unknown Pleasures [1]. In a sense Saville is pushing form the opposite direction of Kovach, trying to use human skills to create art that feels somehow robotic and sterile (whereas Kovach does the opposite, create something that feels more human than your typical machine generated art).

I don't see current generation a threat to art, but rather the trend towards the reduction of art towards being a reproducible, automatic process. That is the art that can be replaced with AI was already art created by an ad hoc "artifical" artist.

0. https://bendotk.com/

1. https://m.media-amazon.com/images/I/812FS2R2v6L._SL1500_.jpg

> If they produce artwork that is objectively worse than a human-painted version would be, but still "good enough" for many mundane usecases - stock photos, concept art, etc - we might still see a wide adoption and displacement of human artists from those usecases - along with an overall drop in quality of artworks.

If people are happy with "good enough" they generally don't hire a digital artist in the first place (the whole reason DALL-E can exist is because there's a lot of digital imagery on relevant subjects/objects available to it to train, and there's even more an internet search away) or if they do, they get one off Fiverr.

For mocking up quick concepts, that might be different, but that's a workflow improvement.

We'll want to be a little careful with how society responds to this. Basquiat put it well ( http://bastiat.org/en/petition.html)

Excerpt follows:

"We are suffering from the ruinous competition of a rival who apparently works under conditions so far superior to our own for the production of light that he is flooding the domestic market with it at an incredibly low price; for the moment he appears, our sales cease, all the consumers turn to him, and a branch of French industry whose ramifications are innumerable is all at once reduced to complete stagnation. This rival, which is none other than the sun, is waging war on us so mercilessly we suspect he is being stirred up against us by perfidious Albion (excellent diplomacy nowadays!), particularly because he has for that haughty island a respect that he does not show for us

.

We ask you to be so good as to pass a law requiring the closing of all windows, dormers, skylights, inside and outside shutters, curtains, casements, bull's-eyes, deadlights, and blinds — in short, all openings, holes, chinks, and fissures through which the light of the sun is wont to enter houses, to the detriment of the fair industries with which, we are proud to say, we have endowed the country, a country that cannot, without betraying ingratitude, abandon us today to so unequal a combat."

What do you think the artists "trained on"? Didn't they ever see anyone else's art? Don't you think it influenced their art?

If it's a 1:1 copy, I agree. If it's a "that looks vaguely like the style that xyz likes to use", I disagree.

And I assume you'd run into plenty of situations where multiple people would discover that it's their unique style that is being imitated. Kind of like that story about a hipster threatening to sue a magazine for using his image in an article only to find out that he's a hipster and dresses and styles himself like countless other people, so much so that he himself wasn't able to tell himself apart from another guy.

A Ferrari is a luxury item. The exhibition was free but you could pay to stay the night. The guy also designs slides and the tone of his exhibition style is not "high art".

Ultimately you are talking about art as a product and that means you think all art is captured by Warhol's system of art. Which is what all digital artists overreacting to this also think. It's not the totality of what art is. I like DALL-E. Good work, but now what else is there beyond digital art? Or by pushing digital art to some more extreme outcome?