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

That's an even better example. Although I can see Ted Chiang arguing that the really good directors painstakingly redo shots, cut, edit etc. Maybe the essence of art is the grind? Not sure.

>is a man pushing a button on a camera art?

"No"

>A man pushing a button on an image generator?

"No"

Thank you, I don't need anything else.

It doesn’t seem at all weird to me that paintings have completely different standards than films. Using a ghost painter does seem a little like cheating, if the painting is sold as being the creative and manual work of the named painter. It seems slightly dishonest to advertise it and talk about it as the creative manual work of one person, but create it using other people. I mean, I’m sure it really does happen and that some people don’t care, but still it doesn’t seem clearly and cleanly ethical unless they advertise the paintings as cooperative works and credit the painter.

In the art world, painting and sculpting are known as ‘fine art’ partly because they’re supposed to be singular creative works that aren’t reproducible and that came from an artist, or in other words they’re judged by the purity of the discipline (according to the Wikipedia page on Fine Art). Prints and photography are second-tier because they use machinery to duplicate images, and they go to lengths artificially limiting the number of copies and including certificates of authenticity just to try to sit above commercial art and ads, closer to fine art. Directing a ghost painter isn’t that far of a step away from selling a print as though it’s a unique original. Artists caught doing that would quickly lose any notoriety.

Films inherently take many people to create, and more importantly many people get the credit. The lay public knows that films are created by large teams & production companies. Paintings, on the other hand, are supposed to be a one-person show, the sole painter gets all the credit. Painting is taught as a solo creative endeavor, the public thinks of it as a solo process, and the narrative of the artistry includes technique because it’s a manual solo process.

> Those have a skill floor though

Point-and-shoot cameras, finger painting, or crayons have a lower skill floor than even basic text-to-image generation, I'd claim. You can give those to children prior to the age where they'd have a proper grasp on describing visuals through language/writing.

Yet, I don't feel as though the glut of low-skill content subtracts from any of those mediums - regardless of whether you disqualify a child's macaroni art from being art. Probably even the opposite; I've enjoyed areas that have lowered the technical skill barrier to allow people to create who otherwise wouldn't have been able to (like the creative explosion around Flash games, with ActionScript and the tooling being relatively beginner-friendly) in addition to it leading to more (even if proportionally less) high-skill content.

> But, a working class person who has things they want to express artistically is going hit various walls with generative models very quickly, in much the same way I did. Like, if you feel a creative verve at all, I just can't fathom you looking at the wide assortment of all manner of tooling, and choosing the one where you're playing telephone with a toddler that paints over-smoothed, nonsensical photo-realistic pictures.

I think the walls of what's possible using generative techniques in your workflow are almost by definition* further out than with only traditional techniques, and that the idea generative tools must be like "playing telephone with a toddler" comes largely from not having tried out most of the generative tools available or typical workflows.

I'd recommend checking out ComfyUI, starting with some existing examples (https://comfyworkflows.com/ seems to show workflows, when you click on the image) then playing around to see what's possible. Or for something a bit less technical, NVIDIA Canvas is fun, and useful for skyboxes: https://www.nvidia.com/en-gb/studio/canvas/

*: For a while 3D ML tools in particular did somewhat lock you out of other tools due to working on NeRF representations, but increasingly there's the option for regular meshes with sensible topology.

> And again we go back to the notion that "the process is the point" and as a creative, I completely agree. There are certainly times I feel frustration at my tools and wish they would just make what the hell I'm trying to make, but if that was the entire process, I would get nothing from it. Figuring out what prompt will get you what kind of output is interesting, but it's not fulfilling.

Do you not think you could be fulfilled with tools that let you focus on the bigger picture? I've worked with traditional procedural generation for cityscapes before and I don't feel it necessarily took away - just widened the scale I could create at, while still allowing me to zoom in and tweak individual buildings where I needed to.

> To be totally real I've never heard of someone drawing normal maps. I thought the traditional way you went about making those was having a high-detail model inside a low-detail one, and generating them that way.

If you have a 3D mesh sculpted then yeah you'd bake its normals from geometry - but you don't have that if you've just, for instance, painted some planks texture in Photoshop. You could hand-paint a normal map, hand-paint a height map and generate the normal map from that, or - as is increasingly common - generate normal/specular/roughness based on texture.