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Moleskine's AI Lord of the Rings collection can only mock

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Re: Moleskine's AI Lord of the Rings collection can only mock

#61

I find this post baffling. Would one normally demand angrily to find out whether someone used photoshop when making a product mockup? If not, why is this different? It only makes sense if you’ve made a political decision that anything associated with AI is bad, regardless of whether you would otherwise like it.

Depends on the photo, but yes, people do demand information about software used on photos, some countries even have laws for this. Authenticity is relevant in many areas.

Re: Moleskine's AI Lord of the Rings collection can only mock

#62
post #45

I find this post baffling. Would one normally demand angrily to find out whether someone used photoshop when making a product mockup? If not, why is this different? It only makes sense if you’ve made a political decision that anything associated with AI is bad, regardless of whether you would otherwise like it.

There're a strong disdain agains any AI among the artists. I've seen these kind of comments many times, like people getting upset someone uses AI-generated profile pic in Discord. I get that they're scared. They should be: it was difficult to make a living for many artists even before AI. The market was already oversaturated and they had to accept low-paying irregular jobs. But now there's literally no light in the e…

Something I read elsewhere was "if someone is using an AI avatar, they were never going to be your customer anyway".

I used to commission avatars every year or two from a specific artist. It wasn't super cheap (hundreds of dollars). At the end of the day though, spending hundreds of dollars, waiting weeks, and then maybe getting 85% of what I wanted doesn't make sense when I could instead spend ~$0, wait 30 seconds, and get 98% of what I want.

In my view, artists should be moving up the 'stack'. If they are a commission artist, they should be having customers come to them with their '98% efforts' or only taking on commissions that either mean too much, too elaborate for AI, or otherwise sensitive.

Humans want art. Humans love pretty things. AI will never replace the entire need for artists. I see it as getting rid of the bad commissioners (price sensitive, beggars, etc) and making it easier for people to express themselves thereby making an artist's job easier to extract info from their commissioners.

Re: Moleskine's AI Lord of the Rings collection can only mock

#63
post #6

These look nice. It seems it’s been confirmed these aren’t AI generated. But want to say even if they were, I’d have no problem with them being AI at all. This is one of those wedge issues that people get all activated about (it felt like the conversation was more nuanced when the models were more of toys and had too many fingers like Stable Diffusion) but to me it feels analogous to someone being mad that someone is…

> The market will definitely make the decision here

I don't understand this, the market is not a divine entity, you can choose to be passive about it and let others decide, but there's nothing wrong with people pushing "the market" towards what they see is right. Big corporations do it already so it's perfectly fine for people to call attention on this, campaign against it, etc ... which is what this article is doing

Re: Moleskine's AI Lord of the Rings collection can only mock

#64
post #43

If you can't even tell it's AI and need to be told... then what's the problem? Personal preference? It's like only enjoying paintings if the artist used horse hair and horse hair alone for their paintbrush.... A very arbitrary constraint

Because the existing cultural understanding of art is that someone took the time to create what you’re experiencing. AI generated “art” subverts that expectation. It feels deceptive. Honestly it reminds of Duchamp’s Fountain and similar works, which some people hated for more or less the same reason. I am not equating AI slop with Marcel Duchamp, however. His work and what he did was very much intentional to evoke th…

Moleskin is selling notebooks, not art. They happen to come with graphical elements, but I don't see them claiming those are art. So where is the deception?

Re: Moleskine's AI Lord of the Rings collection can only mock

#65
post #31
post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Does it matter? If you are opposed to buying AI art wouldn't you also be opposed to buying art from an AI ad?

Not from principle. Marketing is hateful work and almost necessarily anti-art, so I don't care. Of course you can do it badly (for example, unironically advertise to an artist audience with terrible slop illustrations).

I don't see how replacing a photographer with AI for advertising is considerably different from replacing a photographer of a nature scene with AI. Is it just "AI is okay for commercial uses"?

But it seems more extreme when the AI is recreating the art you are considering buying.

Re: Moleskine's AI Lord of the Rings collection can only mock

#66
I think a lot of people are misunderstanding this.

This is not some random tie-in to the LOTR franchise. Moleskine used to be one of the main notebooks for artists for a long time, and as the article mentions some of their notebooks have featured artists in their cover, their manifesto is all about "timeless power of handwriting" and "put pen to paper, and unleash your unique voice", etc. Having a company with that reputation and those connections to the art world just go with some AI slop for this collaboration is a slap to the face to its own users for potentially selling some notebooks to unsuspecting LOTR fans.

It's the enshittification of a brand once loved by artists.

Re: Moleskine's AI Lord of the Rings collection can only mock

#67

"There is also this notebook that features a map, which is included in the Instagram post but is nowhere to be found on the website. The map is too blurry to make out properly, but the geography looks inconsistent with other maps of Middle-earth." Absolutely unconscionable. Ads need to be truthful. They can't just make things up that aren't actually in the product. It's literally false advertising. I'm not against AI…

> Ads need to be truthful.

Since when? Ads are full of made up shit. Even the products are often presented in a way where it's obvious that something is not real.

Re: Moleskine's AI Lord of the Rings collection can only mock

#68
post #6

These look nice. It seems it’s been confirmed these aren’t AI generated. But want to say even if they were, I’d have no problem with them being AI at all. This is one of those wedge issues that people get all activated about (it felt like the conversation was more nuanced when the models were more of toys and had too many fingers like Stable Diffusion) but to me it feels analogous to someone being mad that someone is…

I generally disagree with your stance (though I respect it as your opinion) and would like to offer you a different view on this. It might take a bit to explain my point so please bear with me.

Using AI for creative purposes, specifically ones where the creative input is the goal, is one usage of AI that I strongly dislike. Art has always been seen and used to express something. It could be emotions, it could be a perspective, it could be a political opinion, or something entirely different. Every person doing art has an intention behind their performance. The intent may not even always be obvious to the artist, and sometimes the intent is money, but its there nonetheless. The end result of that intent can also be good or bad art.

For me it doesn't really matter what the thought behind a specific piece of art is, as long as there was one. I may not like a specific piece of art or even the intention behind it, but I also don't have to. I may not even understand a specific piece but that's also fine.

With AI, there is no intent. The AI isn't thinking. It doesn't know why a pixel was placed where it was placed, its just going off an algorithm and data that it was trained on. There was no idea, no thought, behind it.

The person prompting the AI is not the artist. They are not the creator and no matter how much work they put into the prompt, the result is not their creation. AI is not a tool in the traditional sense of how we might view a hammer or a camera, its an executor. If I were to go to Fiverr and tell a person to create an image for me, would you consider me the creator of that image? I wouldn't and I think most other people wouldn't either. The process of commissioning an image on the platform might even be exactly the same. You form a prompt, send a message to an artist, get a result, ask for refinement until you're satisfied with the result.

Re: Moleskine's AI Lord of the Rings collection can only mock

#69

I think a lot of people are misunderstanding this. This is not some random tie-in to the LOTR franchise. Moleskine used to be one of the main notebooks for artists for a long time, and as the article mentions some of their notebooks have featured artists in their cover, their manifesto is all about "timeless power of handwriting" and "put pen to paper, and unleash your unique voice", etc. Having a company with that r…

> Moleskine used to be one of the main notebooks for artists for a long time

Isn't that just a story they made up to push their product?

Re: Moleskine's AI Lord of the Rings collection can only mock

#70

I think a lot of people are misunderstanding this. This is not some random tie-in to the LOTR franchise. Moleskine used to be one of the main notebooks for artists for a long time, and as the article mentions some of their notebooks have featured artists in their cover, their manifesto is all about "timeless power of handwriting" and "put pen to paper, and unleash your unique voice", etc. Having a company with that r…

> Moleskine used to be one of the main notebooks for artists for a long time Isn't that just a story they made up to push their product?

potentially, you're right, anecdotally many artists I've known and worked with have always liked and sought those notebooks
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