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Why A.I. Isn't Going to Make Art

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Re: Why A.I. Isn't Going to Make Art

#101

If you ever wonder why everything made with Stable Diffusion looks the same, it's because it can't generate images that are too dark or too bright. The denoising process involves recognizing shapes and shapes naturally have bright spots and dark spots. If you try to render "sea at night" you'll get some huge, bright moon for example. The "AI artists" using this tool lack the technical and artistic competency to reali…

> If you ever wonder why everything made with Stable Diffusion looks the same

Everything you know is made with Stable Diffusion looks the same because if it doesn't look the same you probably don't know it was made with Stable Diffusion.

> The "AI artists" using this tool lack the technical and artistic competency to realize this.

No, they don't. It's been a frequent comment in the AI art community and a thing for which the community has sought and produced both in-generation and auxiliary-tooling solutions for from very early on.

> They didn't write the algorithm, draw the dataset, or train the model.

Perhaps not for the base model, people int he AI art community have done all three of those for improvements to and tools built around the base models and the original code implementation of them.

> I do believe AI can be used in the process to create art as it's just an image generator like fractal art, but the problem is most people are going to use AI not as a means to create art, but as an end.

Most of the people who are using any tool that can be used artistically are going to use it at the most superficial level. Is that true of AI image generators? Sure. But no moreso than it is true of, say, pencils.

> You could fix the problem above by simply importing the image into GIMP and changing the brightness, but nobody does that because they aren't interesting into creating an art piece with a set goal in mind, they're just being entertained by generating dozens or hundreds of images with this technology.

People are using AI image generation with a set goal in mind, and people absolurely do import generated images into to traditional image editors for adjustments. Though a lot of the people that really know what they are doing have that built into their workflows, reducing the need to do manual spot correction in a separate editor.

> Amusingly, you could also just type text in GIMP. Instead there is now something called "flux" that can do text literals.

Image generation models have been able to do text to a certain extent for a while, and improvements in text generation have been a major trumpeted feature of many recent model releases. Flux isn't interesting because "it can do text literals", it is interesting because the community has discovered that it can be finetuned (specifically, that LoRA can be trained for it) that will allow control of text style, similar to fonts.

I wasn't aware that GIMP could comform typed text to the implicit 3d shape of the surfaces it is being placed on in a 2D image, though.

> When everything is AI, and anyone can generate an image with a prompt, the whole market will be so saturated with this (perhaps it already is at the rate these are generated) that all the novelty will be gone.

Probably. So what? Novelty isn't the point in every image people produce. Lowering the cost and effort to produce basically "looks good" images for lots of casual uses isn't, itself, an advance in fine art, sure. But it is, in itself, useful.

Re: Why A.I. Isn't Going to Make Art

#102
post #24

Artists have been spending decades redefining art to broaden it as much as possible, to the point where it seems to be defined now as anything that makes you feel something. It sure seems like AI art is making some people feel something alright.

Do you feel anything when looking at DALE 3 images on this page? https://openai.com/index/dall-e-3/ I can’t tell you why, but I don’t really react to any of them or really any AI art I’ve seen.

There’s people already creating content with AI that resonates with me as much as content without. AI is just another tool in the box.

One example I recommend is the Unanswered oddities series. Really funny. All visuals and audio AI generated.

https://www.reddit.com/r/singularity/comments/1e6c1d4/unansw...

Re: Why A.I. Isn't Going to Make Art

#103
post #92

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Humans have consciousness, and free will which is expressed through intention which forms a causal chain. Photography on its own is usually vapid but it’s subject can be meaningful.

You dodge my questions and from your word soup I can infer that the matter is not as simple as you said ahah

You can believe whatever you want but your question is irrelevant. Art is made by people, there’s no ambiguity.

Re: Why A.I. Isn't Going to Make Art

#104
post #6

Reminds me to when Ebert argued video games can't be art. https://www.rogerebert.com/roger-ebert/video-games-can-never... The argument rings just as silly today as it was 12 years ago.

The problem with this discussion is not only that the definition of "art" lacks a consensus. The main issue is that instead of being a descriptive, a lot of people call something "art" as a compliment. Which is utterly silly, by the way.

Because at that point "art" becomes sinply something that is "aesthetically pleasant", and that will change from person to person. "Art" as a compliment is useless.

If we try to use "art" as a descriptive, then we would need to draw a hypothetical Venn diagram, and define things that are art and things that are not, so we could try to categorize videogames, or whatever AI produces. This implies a lot more agreement than there is currently.

Re: Why A.I. Isn't Going to Make Art

#105

This is an amusingly ignorant article. Its initial argument, that AI tools don't produce art because they offer meaningfully fewer knobs and dials to creators than a camera, is a classic example of mistaking the contingent for the essential. Those knobs and dials do exist. Download a copy of Stable Diffusion and see all the things you can tweak, iteratively, using the same seed, to work towards an image you desire. T…

> Its initial argument, that AI tools don't produce art because they offer meaningfully fewer knobs and dials to creators than a camera Chiang is not saying this at all. I'm not sure how you interpreted it this way.

> > Its initial argument, that AI tools don't produce art because they offer meaningfully fewer knobs and dials to creators than a camera

> Chiang is not saying this at all. I'm not sure how you interpreted it this way.

He says this, very explicitly, in his direct comparison with photography. I'm not sure how you managed to miss it.

"When photography was first developed, I suspect it didn’t seem like an artistic medium because it wasn’t apparent that there were a lot of choices to be made; you just set up the camera and start the exposure. But over time people realized that there were a vast number of things you could do with cameras, and the artistry lies in the many choices that a photographer makes. It might not always be easy to articulate what the choices are, but when you compare an amateur’s photos to a professional’s, you can see the difference. So then the question becomes: Is there a similar opportunity to make a vast number of choices using a text-to-image generator? I think the answer is no."

Re: Why A.I. Isn't Going to Make Art

#106
post #24

Artists have been spending decades redefining art to broaden it as much as possible, to the point where it seems to be defined now as anything that makes you feel something. It sure seems like AI art is making some people feel something alright.

Do you feel anything when looking at DALE 3 images on this page? https://openai.com/index/dall-e-3/ I can’t tell you why, but I don’t really react to any of them or really any AI art I’ve seen.

I also don't feel anything looking at most "modern art".

It is still considered art.

Re: Why A.I. Isn't Going to Make Art

#107
post #92

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You dodge my questions and from your word soup I can infer that the matter is not as simple as you said ahah

You can believe whatever you want but your question is irrelevant. Art is made by people, there’s no ambiguity.

"Your questions disprove my point so they are irrelevant" damn ahaha

Re: Why A.I. Isn't Going to Make Art

#108
post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Do you feel anything when looking at DALE 3 images on this page? https://openai.com/index/dall-e-3/ I can’t tell you why, but I don’t really react to any of them or really any AI art I’ve seen.

I also don't feel anything looking at most "modern art". It is still considered art.

Modern art is considered art because it's a form of human expression, regardless of whether you "get it" or not - it matters that a human being made it, as opposed to a machine.

Re: Why A.I. Isn't Going to Make Art

#109
post #108

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I also don't feel anything looking at most "modern art". It is still considered art.

Modern art is considered art because it's a form of human expression, regardless of whether you "get it" or not - it matters that a human being made it, as opposed to a machine.

If a machine makes something that elicits genuine emotional response it is not art?

Art must necessarily be made by a human to be considered art?

The definition gets less useful by the second.

Re: Why A.I. Isn't Going to Make Art

#110
post #77

This is an amusingly ignorant article. Its initial argument, that AI tools don't produce art because they offer meaningfully fewer knobs and dials to creators than a camera, is a classic example of mistaking the contingent for the essential. Those knobs and dials do exist. Download a copy of Stable Diffusion and see all the things you can tweak, iteratively, using the same seed, to work towards an image you desire. T…

My friend is a very good painter, but not a famous painter. In the art world, its an open secret that most famous painters, especially ones that are old, don't really paint much. They hire "ghost-painters" to do the actual work for them, and they simply set the direction of the art pieces and collaborate with the hired-on-contract ghost-painters. My friend has painted for a bunch of these artists and when I ask her w…

It's weird that in, let's call it "static visual art", so many people defining "artistry" so narrowly, but in, say, film, we recognize -- just in regard to the visual production, not even talking about script, acting, etc. -- that the director, cinematographer, and camera operators, and others, are all artists on some level, and no one would argue that automating functions of one of those roles would negate the artistry of the others, whereas in static visual art narrowing the human involvement to a directorial role is seen as making it non-artistic.
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