Earlier quoted context omitted.
I’m curious if someone coming into that fresh, without having had the mental exercise of, for example, grappling with data structures and (lower-level) algorithms in practical applications by hand, could achieve a mindset that useful and productive? When I was in design school, as much of our work was in physical media — graphite, cut paper, paint, vine charcoal — as was practicing great kerning and getting experienc…
I was thinking about this (while drawing), and there's a few points to make: * There's meaning in all the little marks. Drawings are potentially layered with meaning. I was drawing a stick I found in the park, and thinking: this is the extent and the way in which the stick is straight or curved, and the specific way and form that it's knobbly, and that's all explained by how it grew; this green on it is the peculiar…
Diffusion models basically record, classify, and amalgamate those decisions, which is why it’s so dang difficult to get generated art to look like something distinct. Not distinct like an existing artist, but genuinely unique.
The workflow of the prompter is very similar to an existing workflow in the art world: someone commissioning art. There’s often a discussion where the customer gives the artist a textual description, back-and-forth with sketches and preliminary versions, and sometimes revisions if the proposed final product isn’t what they wanted. Commissioning a piece of art is a creative process, but it’s not the same thing as being the artist. Even an art director who has extremely granular control over what they commission would never claim to be the artist. They’d get run out of town. I believe creating a collection though juxtaposition or even curation could be art, but you’d still never be the author of the contained pieces.