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You can't afford to be an artist and/or author, let alone be respected

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Re: You can't afford to be an artist and/or author, let alone be respected

#181

Post by ch4s3 »

andreilys wrote: post #175
ch4s3 wrote: post #161

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think you’d be hard pressed to find a group of people with minimal education in art who couldn’t reliably pice out the AI generated images. You might be able to trick them with abstract images or things intended to look like computer generated art that doesn’t have a complex or human subject matter. Frankly humans and animals generated by these things look like blurry trash or are wrong on details in a way a human…

Sounds like you haven't been looking that hard. There are plenty examples on the DALL-E subreddit that put the majority of Deviant Art artists to shame.

I just spent about 15 minutes scrolling and I’ll grant that the best 2 or 3 examples are better than the low low bar of some random crap on the social network of amateur art. Even those have weird artifacts and an utterly odd quality that feels inhuman.

The best looking ones in general feel like banksy painting a character into a flea market painting, collage.

Re: You can't afford to be an artist and/or author, let alone be respected

#182

Post by pyuser583 »

Geonode wrote: post #128
jfengel wrote: post #106

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I am active in non-professional theater, and a lot of people come through my group with the hope of becoming professionals. My advice to them is that if there is anything else they can do, do it. Being a professional actor is miserable. The odds are it will fail entirely; most of the remainder will barely make subsistence. Much of what I do is to provide a place for people to be genuinely creative in ways that they c…

As a long time theatre professional, all theatre is non professional. Or rather, it's not a business, and therefore there's not an avenue to success. All theatre, even (and especially) Broadway exists only because rich people funnel free money into it. Regionally as donors, and on Broadway as "investors" who almost never make a return. It is a rich people's hobby and for those who do make a career out of it, it's lot…

I read an interview with Francis Ford Coppola a while ago. He’s filthy rich.

He emphasized again and again he isn’t rich because of his movies. He made outside investments than turned out well.

He made it pretty clear any future movies he makes will he self-funded and at a loss.

So even Hollywood is at the mercy of donors.

Re: You can't afford to be an artist and/or author, let alone be respected

#183

Post by rafaelero »

psychomugs wrote: post #164
rafaelero wrote: post #143

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's quite simple to verify your assertion. Someone should show people some pieces of art and ask them to rate the quality of each of them. If the rating between human-made art and machine-made art doesn't differ significantly, then we can comfortably say that there is nothing special on art produced by humans. I think I know what the result will be, but hopefully some researcher will carefully investigate this issue…

This operates on the very narrow view that the only value of art is its aesthetics, and that art can be measured against objective ratings. I value art because it communicates something from an actual human being, like an exchanging between consciousnesses. When I can derive the choices of an author or photographer or any other class of artist, I find a mutual perspective that, at the root of it, makes me feel unders…

Yeah, we do enjoy that human connection / communication. That's why I think we will see a lot of artists using AI to generate their art and then sell it as if it were their own and assign some deep meaning to them.

Re: You can't afford to be an artist and/or author, let alone be respected

#184

Post by pyuser583 »

squeaky-clean wrote: post #70
ohiovr wrote: post #21

Who paid for the great works of music in the period between 1700 and 1918? From such musicians as Liszt, Beethoven, Mozart, Bartok, Handel, Debussy, Bach etc... there were a heck of a lot of great composers in that period. I was analyzing Bach the other day. His Brandenburg Concerto #2 has tens of thousands of notes. That is a heck of a lot of work.

Bach had a salary while he was the Cantor at Thomasschule, but most of his income came from funerals and weddings. https://bachnetwork.org/ub12/ub12-heber.pdf There were a lot of great composers in that period, but that's over 200 years and there were probably many more who are forgotten or were never even given the opportunity. And today there are probably more songs released on Spotify daily than were written in al…

Backs descendants worked as court musicians for the various Germanic states right up until WWI.

Wagoners family is still in charge of the Bayreuth festival in Germany.

Re: You can't afford to be an artist and/or author, let alone be respected

#185

Post by hnzix »

rafaelero wrote: post #127
8f2ab37a-ed6c wrote: post #95

There's a lot of entitlement from "artists" who sit on a moral high horse and expect special treatment because they're "expressing a higher truth" while the rest of us normies toil in obscurity and sell our souls to corporate overlords to pay the bills. Not all artists are like that, and IME the more successful and experienced ones are the least likely to think that way, but the attitude is quite common with beginner…

With the development of AI, it's been quite an experience to see artists grasping the fact that their craft is not the magical thing they think it is.

There's nothing particularly magical about craft. Craft is a process that most people can learn. But art is not craft. The magic of art is in the artist's taste and personality.

Until AI has a sense of good taste and can carefully blend multiple styles into a new genre, the human cannot be replaced. And at that point we're basically at the singularity.

Re: You can't afford to be an artist and/or author, let alone be respected

#186

Post by rafaelero »

ch4s3 wrote: post #181
andreilys wrote: post #175

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sounds like you haven't been looking that hard. There are plenty examples on the DALL-E subreddit that put the majority of Deviant Art artists to shame.

I just spent about 15 minutes scrolling and I’ll grant that the best 2 or 3 examples are better than the low low bar of some random crap on the social network of amateur art. Even those have weird artifacts and an utterly odd quality that feels inhuman. The best looking ones in general feel like banksy painting a character into a flea market painting, collage.

Give it another year. These models will only get better.

Re: You can't afford to be an artist and/or author, let alone be respected

#187

Post by LudwigNagasena »

anigbrowl wrote: post #51
thethethethe wrote: post #33

Seems a little entitled to me. Why should artists be able to spend their time doing exactly what they want while all the boring plebs have to pick vegetables/write CRUD apps? Sounds like someone is upset that more people dont find utility in their work

I hear this a lot from people who don't understand how much hard work is involved in the art life, or generalize from notoriously feckless examples.

I don’t understand what point this is supposed to rebuke.

Do you know how much hard work is involved in getting ps4 platinum trophies? So what?

Re: You can't afford to be an artist and/or author, let alone be respected

#188

Post by hnzix »

finexplained wrote: post #174
pcwalton wrote: post #167

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Obviously artists provide business value. That's why there is such a thing as the entertainment industry.

The distribution is different. The median programmer provides much more value than the median artist. Additionally math/cs skills apply much more broadly than art skills. The entertainment industry would be much less leveraged without the tools we built for them.

The median programmer provides much more value than the median artist.

An economy is not a society. There is more to the human experience than "number goes up".

Re: You can't afford to be an artist and/or author, let alone be respected

#189

Post by matheusmoreira »

nbzso wrote: post #141

A little life story: I had commercial success in art at the humble age of 23. Not only were my paintings respected and collected by accomplished and wealthy individuals, they formed commissions for years to come. My success was the result of an obsession with craftsmanship and clever word-of-mouth marketing. Suddenly, one day after insisting on meeting the deadline of the expensive commission, I had a headache and my…

> I don't paint for you. I paint for myself. It's part of my life.

> A place where there are no compromises, no demands, no expectations, no projections, no assessments, no tasks, no metrics, no applause and no glory.

> A place where I am happy.

I have immense respect for you. I did something along these lines too: switched fields so I could write software for myself. The same reasons you listed resonated deeply with me.

Re: You can't afford to be an artist and/or author, let alone be respected

#190

Post by the_cat_kittles »

dogman144 wrote: post #165

Per this thread, apparently some engineers really dislike artists. I wonder if this is because artists and engineers both claim expertise in the meaning making process - a painting, or an app. I make my paycheck via that meaningless tech money like most others here, but that aside, I’m under no illusions that I’m doing much beyond solving crossword puzzles for high pay and providing for my family. Every time tech wad…

there is nothing more gutting than seeing the purpose that art can give to some people when you work somewhere that you dont believe in
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