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Coarse is better

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Re: Coarse is better

#61

Post by 2b3a51 »

dleeftink wrote: post #43

Eno applies: > It's the sound of failure: so much modern art is the sound of things going out of control, of a medium pushing to its limits and breaking apart. The distorted guitar sound is the sound of something too loud for the medium supposed to carry it. The blues singer with the cracked voice is the sound of an emotional cry too powerful for the throat that releases it. The excitement of grainy film, of bleached…

And

> "By the time a whole technology exists for something it probably isn't the most interesting thing to be doing."

Re: Coarse is better

#62

Post by card_zero »

nehal3m wrote: post #60
card_zero wrote: post #59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

OK, but then there's the possibility of reestablishing the bandwidth by selecting the output. If the artist selects one AI image from hundreds, that's like photography, or collage, or "found sculpture" if you can dig it. Then we can do away with the need for hundreds of versions by saying that the artist selected this image from among all the assorted sights seen during the day to frame as art and present to the view…

Sort of. It’s like selecting from hundreds of versions of a letter of reference that word the same three bullet points slightly differently. It still feels empty to me, but I guess that’s personal.

I reckon it's not personal, and you and Doctorow are objectively correct, but the explanation isn't great.

Re: Coarse is better

#64

Post by [deleted] »

RHSeeger wrote: post #23
pornel wrote: post #13

The author is using special prompts exploiting flaws of the old models, and doesn't like that new models interpret the hacks literally instead. The new models have prompt adherence precise enough to distinguish what "British Museum" or "auction at Christie's" is from the art itself, instead of blending a bag of words together into a single vector and implicitly copying all of the features of all works containing "mus…

The prompts bothered me a lot, too. I don't do a lot of work with AI, but > A painting sold at Sotheby's and > A painting in the style of something that would be sold at Sotheby's convey very different meaning (to me).

[deleted]

Re: Coarse is better

#65

Post by tormeh »

card_zero wrote: post #54
only-one1701 wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I would never argue that a painting of a car crash couldn’t be art. It’s funny your bringing up that a camera is a tool for creating art; I also hold photographic art in lower esteem than other kinds of visual art (though I still think some kind of photography can be art). At a certain point, we need to be realistic about the amount of effort involved in artistic creation. Here’s a thought experiment: someone puts tw…

It's going to be "creativity" (another hazy definition!) rather than effort, though. Photography, often said to be all about framing, seems very low effort. You might take one lucky snap. Then the effort can be claimed to be in years of getting ready to be lucky, which is a fair point, but that displaced effort isn't really in the specific photo. Besides, maybe you're a very happy photographer, loved every minute of…

Yeah, photography (editing aside) is about having taste and getting lucky. A good photographer can of course raise their odds of getting lucky, but still. There's some technique in there too, but that's really not all that complicated. That said, I think few things match a good photo. There's something about a photo subject being real that I find fascinating. A photo exhibition does not display the imagination of the photographers, but rather the incredible in the real world.

Re: Coarse is better

#66

Post by yoan9224 »

The author's prompts are fighting against what Nano Banana was optimized for. Saying "British Museum" to MJv2 worked because it blurred all images tagged with museums into the aesthetic. NBP interprets it literally: show me something IN a museum.

This isn't worse - it's different. MJv2 was a happy accident machine. NBP is a precision tool.

If you want the coarse aesthetic, prompt for it: "rough brushstrokes, visible canvas texture, unfinished edges, painterly, loose composition". NBP will give you exactly that because it actually understands what you're asking for.

The real lesson: we're in a transition period where prompting strategies that exploited old model quirks no longer work. That's fine - we just need to adapt our prompting to match what the model was designed to do.

Re: Coarse is better

#67

Post by wrsh07 »

airstrike wrote: post #37

I'm no image gen expert but these prompts are downright terrible even by my standards. Are you really complaining that ", from the British Museum." leads to it a painting in the actual British Museum? Just remove the sentence, and you'll be fine. Now good luck trying to make Midjourney place the image at the museum! I'm a paying MJ user and am impressed by Nano Banana. They're different models. They each serve their…

It is interesting what the nbp model takes away from the prompt, though

Eg instead of focusing on the artist, it focuses on the location

This makes sense! I imagine it was trained in some sort of rlvr like way where you give it a prompt and then interrogate "does this image ..." (where each question examines a different aspect of the prompt)

It's obviously an incredible model. I think there's a limit to how useful another article praising it is in contrast with one expressing frustration

I would also welcome someone writing a short takedown where they fix the prompts and get better-than-2022 results from nbp

Re: Coarse is better

#68

Post by flir »

smurda wrote: post #35

Another word for coarse is impasto technique, where the paint is so thick the painting-knife or brush strokes are visible and leave a pronounced texture (e.g. Van Gogh, Rembrandt). Another cool prompt could be specific painting techniques (e.g. pencil shading, glaze) as if you were training an actual artist in a specific technique.

Just asked sora for an impasto image of a coca cola bottle. But it still came out looking like a coca cola ad/AI art. Super glossy, slick, meaningless. It didn't look like paint. (And the logo wasn't impasto, which I thought was interesting - I guess that logo's utterly ingrained in the model, it's seen it so many times).

Re: Coarse is better

#69

Post by recursivecaveat »

Maybe it's better that this author is using LLMs because they would be an immensely frustrating client for an artist. Asks for futurism: complains about getting it. Wants bright colors: refuses to ask. Parts of the request are supposed to be evocative and parts are supposed to be literal, who knows which.

Re: Coarse is better

#70

Post by greekrich92 »

card_zero wrote: post #51
jellyroll42 wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Correct! The process and struggle of creation is a large part of what makes art art. Removing friction from the process makes something artless.

Yes, but: when I was young I used to love photorealism and hyperrealism, which is super-smooth-and-shiny art that conceals its process in order to awe simpletons. Then I bought an airbrush, and then true color computer graphics happened, and soon after that I began to appreciate brush strokes and the texture of pen marks and the idea of the personality of the artist's hand. But that doesn't mean the process-hiding st…

Art that takes tremendous effort but looks effortless isn't negated by my comment. The process and struggle is still there.
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