Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

GenAI Art Is the Least Imaginative Use of AI Imaginable

hai.stanford.edu

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

111–120 of 149 posts

Re: GenAI Art Is the Least Imaginative Use of AI Imaginable

#111

Post by perching_aix »

Fricken wrote: post #54
jedberg wrote: post #34

Of all the things I do with AI, art is probably the one I do the most. When you create written content on the internet, "the algorithm" rewards you more if you add art to it. I am not an artist, but I can write good. So when I'm done writing, I pop over to my AI image generator, describe a few images I want, pop them into the post, and away I go! And then boom, greater engagement. As an added bonus, I don't have to w…

Once I was an editorial illustrator, and the mantra always was "concept is king". Stick figures are kosher so long as they communicate something. Impressionists emerged following the invention of the camera, as they had no more incentive to pursue realism. I think in the age of AI slop any form of crude image making is better so long as it's human. Scribble something out with crayons. Shape an animal out of a slice o…

This is actually reflected even in the AI slop. Most pictures look broadly appealing and correct, but very generic. So to draw a crowd it has to stand out some other way - be it the lighting, the colors, the materials, the framing, the poses, the setting, or whatever else. They really made me reevaluate what is it that I'm actually looking for and how much I value each of these aspects.

Re: GenAI Art Is the Least Imaginative Use of AI Imaginable

#112

Post by brulard »

tommilburn wrote: post #82
ilaksh wrote: post #64

I would really like an objective explanation of why this attitude "that the whole point of art is the process of making it" is anything but pretentiousness in it's purest form. Surely the actual artifact itself has some value? And even if one supposes that a key part of the value is self-exploration (which I disagree with generally because that presupposes an excessive level of self-importance), then being able to it…

> I would really like an objective explanation of why this attitude "that the whole point of art is the process of making it" is anything but pretentiousness in it's purest form. i think that's a problem - i am no philosopher or art historian, but i truly can't think of "objective" truths of any kind when i think about art, the process of making art, or the process of engaging with art. it's nice to make art. i play…

> genuinely - have you encountered AI-generated art that you find valuable? that you tell other people about or have kept a copy of for yourself somehow?

Oh, man, absolutely. Few examples:

- My daughter and I created a song about our cat with Udio. It took some trials and errors, but the result is awesome and it made us laugh many times since. - Some early AI poems and stories that we generated are memes already for us - I generate a lot of music and created tooling around it so I can curate and iterate upon them in quantities. Out of many thousands attempts there is a few dozen of songs that I absolutely love.

The thing is AI art is rarely 100% AI. But even if it was, I wouldn't feel ashamed if I liked it.

Re: GenAI Art Is the Least Imaginative Use of AI Imaginable

#113

Post by [deleted] »

perching_aix wrote: post #105

Ever since AI art came into the scene I've seen more and better artworks than ever before. I understand why people have ethical problems with it, but the results are genuinely really good even when done by beginners. I honestly think anyone claiming otherwise is just plain lying to themselves at this point. This is to the extreme that sometimes when browsing imageboards I find myself feeling surfeited. It's been a ve…

[deleted]

Re: GenAI Art Is the Least Imaginative Use of AI Imaginable

#114

Post by brulard »

Hatchback7599 wrote: post #55

As a software engineer and artist[1], my views on art and generative AI have been evolving. In my opinion, GenAI has revealed that the art isn't primarily in the creation, but in the selection. It used to take incredible talent to create something worth selecting (writing, painting, sculpture, etc), so creation and selection were often so close to be seen as indistinguishable. A technically skilled artist was likely…

Underappreciated comment right there. The idea about selection vs creation was on my mind, but I wasn't able to put the idea into a solid form as you did there. Thanks.

Re: GenAI Art Is the Least Imaginative Use of AI Imaginable

#115

Post by pockmarked19 »

debugnik wrote: post #110
marssaxman wrote: post #70

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's not the AI that makes the art, but the person who tells the AI what to do. A painter friend of mine has gotten into generative AI lately, and the sometimes-pretty, sometimes-intimidating pictures she comes up with sure look like an artistic expression to me. She has a vision of something she wants to see, and she uses tools to bring that vision into reality, just like she does with paint; the new tools just give…

> It's not the AI that makes the art, but the person who tells the AI what to do. Would you still call them an artist if they commissioned another human actually skilled instead of an AI model? Why can't people accept that their role in this new process simply isn't the one we've always called artist? We don't call computers to the people using a computer, that role is now the machine's. I'd rather label the model it…

> Why can't people accept that their role in this new process simply isn't the one we've always called artist?

I think what has happened here is that you are talking about something very specific. Putting text into midjourney, maybe. That's not the only way people use AI in their art. Are "prompt engineers" artists? Maybe, maybe not, maybe not yet. Maybe they are only as much of an artist as I was back in 2005 while clicking "generate clouds" in Adobe.

We all have to start somewhere.

Re: GenAI Art Is the Least Imaginative Use of AI Imaginable

#116

Post by marssaxman »

debugnik wrote: post #110
marssaxman wrote: post #70

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's not the AI that makes the art, but the person who tells the AI what to do. A painter friend of mine has gotten into generative AI lately, and the sometimes-pretty, sometimes-intimidating pictures she comes up with sure look like an artistic expression to me. She has a vision of something she wants to see, and she uses tools to bring that vision into reality, just like she does with paint; the new tools just give…

> It's not the AI that makes the art, but the person who tells the AI what to do. Would you still call them an artist if they commissioned another human actually skilled instead of an AI model? Why can't people accept that their role in this new process simply isn't the one we've always called artist? We don't call computers to the people using a computer, that role is now the machine's. I'd rather label the model it…

Artists have been using assistants to get their work done since forever; in modern times, Jeff Koons and Damien Hirst are famous for doing little or none of the actual fabrication of the artworks which bear their signatures.

You are right that this is a new process, in which a machine does work that was previously done by a human, but I don't think that means the human is not an artist. Consider the DJ, who "merely" plays back other people's records: yet there's a whole art form in weaving disparate music together. Or, consider, is a composer a musician? The only sound they make is that of a pen scratching on paper; it's not until a room full of other musicians perform the score that you actually hear any music. Yet we still think of the writing of that score as an artistic act.

Re: GenAI Art Is the Least Imaginative Use of AI Imaginable

#117

Post by Manuel_D »

debugnik wrote: post #110
marssaxman wrote: post #70

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's not the AI that makes the art, but the person who tells the AI what to do. A painter friend of mine has gotten into generative AI lately, and the sometimes-pretty, sometimes-intimidating pictures she comes up with sure look like an artistic expression to me. She has a vision of something she wants to see, and she uses tools to bring that vision into reality, just like she does with paint; the new tools just give…

> It's not the AI that makes the art, but the person who tells the AI what to do. Would you still call them an artist if they commissioned another human actually skilled instead of an AI model? Why can't people accept that their role in this new process simply isn't the one we've always called artist? We don't call computers to the people using a computer, that role is now the machine's. I'd rather label the model it…

Isn't this what creative directors do? E.g. the creative director at a game development studio isn't creating art assets, they're directing other artists to produce art in a particular style or theme. Likewise, sculptors and other big art projects often have understudies that carry out a lot of work.

I would still call them artists if they delegate parts of the work to other artists - or machines - if they're the one at the helm of the overall artistic vision.

Re: GenAI Art Is the Least Imaginative Use of AI Imaginable

#118

Post by TeMPOraL »

skydhash wrote: post #106
TeMPOraL wrote: post #101

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You aren't wrong, especially about motivations. The "current consumer focus" has had some weird results, too - particularly in the image/video generation space, it's the consumers , or rather the OSS community, that actually did 90% of the work of turning AI research output into product prototypes - which many a startup now just pick, polish and scale up. Not to dismiss that work, either, but that's mostly the old-sc…

> Civilization advances by extending the number of important operations which we can perform without thinking of them. That's for mass production of useful tools. For decades, it's been easy to produce music, write a book, and draw with digital means. The actual truth is that people don't want to invest the time to learn how. Now they can pose as if they've done so, but the result never survives close inspection.

True, if you evaluate the new in context of the old. Anyone can summon a story with an LLM now, but it ain't gonna be as good as one written by an author pouring their heart and sweat into every word. Same with digital images.

However, the exact same technology is just a small bit plumbing away from allowing people to summon immersive stories in interactive 3D environments, and iteratively sculpt them from within, in the same way people in Star Trek did with the Holodeck (sans the actual holograms, but VR will do as a substitute). The building blocks are all there today, and are up to spec - what's missing is some glue and ironing out a kinks; I expect multiple attempts at this succeeding within next year or two. And this is a new kind of creative field, which will breed new mode of creating art (not just by chatting with a computer - there's a need for fine manual touch, too).

In the end, some things will be diminished, but new things will become possible. I'm mildly positive about it, but I guess we'll soon whether we'll gain more than we lose.

Re: GenAI Art Is the Least Imaginative Use of AI Imaginable

#119

Post by sadeshmukh »

skydhash wrote: post #109
crucialfelix wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Although the chatbot in chrome devtools is really useful. I selected a DOM node and ask "why isn't this visible" and it queried the DOM, css and figured out the height was 0 and explained exactly what lead to it being 0.

The reason for a DOM node not being visible is either the height/width being 0, its position is out of the viewport, it's behind other nodes or its opacity is 0. And that's basically the same for any layout engine that use node tree. The inspector is so easy to use that using a chatbot for the specified reason is a waste of resources.

There are so many more layers. Yeah, the height is zero. Why? Turns out the stylesheet styles are getting overridden by some global and import order is off. This is the perfect case for a chatbot that can see what's going on.

Re: GenAI Art Is the Least Imaginative Use of AI Imaginable

#120

Post by voidhorse »

TeMPOraL wrote: post #101
voidhorse wrote: post #96

It's because this technology isn't (and never has been) intended for the laborers making the stuff. The ultimate aim of these companies is to address the managerial and c suite people with a product that can replace the labor pool. Honestly, I think the current consumer focus is just an irrational consequence of these companies feeling like they can't leave all that consumer money on the table, but, precisely for the…

You aren't wrong, especially about motivations. The "current consumer focus" has had some weird results, too - particularly in the image/video generation space, it's the consumers , or rather the OSS community, that actually did 90% of the work of turning AI research output into product prototypes - which many a startup now just pick, polish and scale up. Not to dismiss that work, either, but that's mostly the old-sc…

Always nice to see Whitehead show up.

That is true, and that makes a lot of sense for supplying the outputs for our vital needs, like shelter, food, etc. But I would argue that creative work is different. Creative work is typically more about the process, not the immediate output, and in fact, it is usually only during the process itself that we figure out what we really want to express in a creative work. Art: "purposefullness without purpose". So, unless you are producing creative works as mere entertainment to fill laborers' time while they recover for the next day of work, and not as a mode of expression, I don't believe a productive optimization argument makes much sense here. We'll see, I could be wrong, the LLM might become a new paintbrush, but I think the inherent stochasticity might prevent that. Regardless, there's a reason all of our analog tools have stuck around for art making in spite of the existence of their highly efficient digital counterparts.

And I think the author of Process and Reality might agree with me.

Post reply on HN