Art is made by people. It’s not complicated.
You have opened a big can of worms that was explored a century ago, if I throw a bucket of paint on a canvas and let it drip, is it made by people? I could argue that the entire painting was made by gravity, which is definitely not human. Where do you draw the line? Is it art if the work is completely digital and made with digital tools, what if I use smart brushes? A camera?
Why A.I. Isn't Going to Make Art
91–100 of 151 posts
Re: Why A.I. Isn't Going to Make Art
#92Earlier quoted context omitted.
You have opened a big can of worms that was explored a century ago, if I throw a bucket of paint on a canvas and let it drip, is it made by people? I could argue that the entire painting was made by gravity, which is definitely not human. Where do you draw the line? Is it art if the work is completely digital and made with digital tools, what if I use smart brushes? A camera?
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.
Re: Why A.I. Isn't Going to Make Art
#93I love articles that tell me why something they can't know is something they like to guess at anyway. This is pointless. Art will get made. Artists will use AI to make some of it. The debate about whether or not its art will be part of the art. This article is not part of anything, it's just throwing punches at air in a tantrum.
> The debate about whether or not its art will be part of the art > This article is not part of anything Seems incoherent I think?
Re: Why A.I. Isn't Going to Make Art
#94Earlier quoted context omitted.
> We are likely talking past each other here. By "searching" I don't mean how inference is currently carried out by efficiently analyzing the context window using weights trained on large data sets fine tuned on specific goals. > I mean the process by which novel information is discovered, which is why many proponents of AI will concede that it's not currently capable of "doing science" or making novel discoveries. H…
AlphaFold is really impressive and made scientific advancements and discoveries in the field of protein folding, and is now even expanding into more molecules and biology, but it was explicitly trained to do just that. You're not going to see AlphaFold write compelling science fiction. We can build models that are specifically trained and fine tuned on scientific fields to make advancements in them, but that's differ…
> You're not going to see AlphaFold write compelling science fiction.
Yes? But not many biology PhDs do that either.
> I'm talking about, which is building a model that forms its own hypothesis, designs its own experiments, and contributes to the wide and deep wealth of knowledge that, crucially, goes well beyond the scope of its training data.
A few weeks ago we saw LLMs do the first half of that. I think AlphaFold demonstrates the last.
Don't get me wrong, I trust the person who told me these are not good papers, but it does do those things: https://sakana.ai/ai-scientist/
Re: Why A.I. Isn't Going to Make Art
#95Earlier quoted context omitted.
AlphaFold is really impressive and made scientific advancements and discoveries in the field of protein folding, and is now even expanding into more molecules and biology, but it was explicitly trained to do just that. You're not going to see AlphaFold write compelling science fiction. We can build models that are specifically trained and fine tuned on scientific fields to make advancements in them, but that's differ…
Ah, sorry, I was editing while you responded. > You're not going to see AlphaFold write compelling science fiction. Yes? But not many biology PhDs do that either. > I'm talking about, which is building a model that forms its own hypothesis, designs its own experiments, and contributes to the wide and deep wealth of knowledge that, crucially, goes well beyond the scope of its training data. A few weeks ago we saw LLMs…
Re: Why A.I. Isn't Going to Make Art
#96I love articles that tell me why something they can't know is something they like to guess at anyway. This is pointless. Art will get made. Artists will use AI to make some of it. The debate about whether or not its art will be part of the art. This article is not part of anything, it's just throwing punches at air in a tantrum.
> The debate about whether or not its art will be part of the art > This article is not part of anything Seems incoherent I think?
Re: Why A.I. Isn't Going to Make Art
#97I love articles that tell me why something they can't know is something they like to guess at anyway. This is pointless. Art will get made. Artists will use AI to make some of it. The debate about whether or not its art will be part of the art. This article is not part of anything, it's just throwing punches at air in a tantrum.
I agree that the article is poorly argued. I think the reason why won't AI can't create art (at least in the near term) comes down to your definition of art. To me, it is a form of communication. This certainly doesn't mean AI can't produce something that people consider art, it means it is incapable of differentiating something humans will consider artistic vs. copy pasta vs. hallucination. In the end, there is a hu…
Something about this article just felt like a kind of gatekeeping in hopes that they can convince people its not worth even trying.
Re: Why A.I. Isn't Going to Make Art
#98Earlier quoted context omitted.
I was making an observation not an argument. With hundreds of millions of such images someone is going to feel something when looking at some of them. But so far I don’t which seems kind of odd. Which is why I was asking if you feel anything looking at those specific images on their home page?
No I don't feel anything. But it's very rare for me to feel anything from a piece of art. Even something as renowned as the Mona Lisa evokes nothing for me. The only classical piece of art that I know of the top of my head that makes me feel something is Edvard Munch’s “Anxiety”. Most of it seems drivel to me where well constructed AI art is better.
If you specifically mean still images it’s worth remembering the context. A great deal of “art” in museums isn’t really aiming for emotional responses. Portraits are just selfie’s before camera phones etc. It’s degraded because the colors have changed over time as the paint degraded. At the extreme ancient sculptures weren’t just stone they got painted. Further even modern art was meant to be viewed in person, a life sized animal sculpture hits very different than that same art on a screen.
Anyway personally walking around museums I responded to quite a bit of the art excluding portraits etc.
Re: Why A.I. Isn't Going to Make Art
#99Earlier quoted context omitted.
I think this is mostly just Sturgeon's law (ninety percent of everything is crap) opposed to anything unique to ML tools. The vast majority of photographs you see on the Internet have also likely been quick phone-camera snaps, with comparatively very little "high art" photography. Lower entry barriers result in more works total, but with disproportionately many at the lower end. There is still a lot of interesting wo…
> I think this is mostly just Sturgeon's law (ninety percent of everything is crap) opposed to anything unique to ML tools. I think the unique point to ML tools is the sheer volume that, IMHO, vastly outpaces 90%. And I think that's partially down to the fact that image generators are themselves, by their existence, low-effort easy-to-use tools to create images. It's not as though there wasn't already a vast and comp…
Is the same not true of point-and-shoot photography? Or crayons? There's a near-endless supply of low-effort content due to tools designed to be easy-to-use. Anecdotally I still see more "crappy photographs" (many of which my own) than "crappy AI art".
With both you can get deeper into the details, making choices about ControlNets, LoRAs, inpainting, etc.
> [...] people who don't want to learn those skills, and like... unskilled artisans don't make good things. Sorry not sorry. If you lack the interest in the subject to learn the skills of how to make a thing [...]
I probably wouldn't make claims about ML tools "democratizing art", but at the same time I feel this is too reductive in the opposite direction.
There are reasons why working-class people are vastly under-represented in arts. I think limited ability to dedicate a huge chunk of time to a creative pursuit is a largely overlooked reason, not just lack of interest.
I think it's also fine to want to, say, design a game without hand-painting all the normal maps - instead generating them with ML tools based on your textures. Someone not specializing to have fine-level technical skills in all relevant areas doesn't imply lack of creativity/interest at a broader scale.
> I think it's important to note that the tools themselves are largely just... not really going to fit into a creative's workflow who has the skills already
I'd claim lot of ML tools, like generative fill built into various image editors, already do even for those who aren't going out of their way to experiment with ML.
Sometimes it's useful to work at the higher level allowed by automation, and sometimes it's useful to have fine-grained creative control. These aren't mutually exclusive - the approaches can/should be mixed where appropriate. I've had good success with sketching out an initial block-color image, then iteratively diffusing and tweaking it.
Re: Why A.I. Isn't Going to Make Art
#100Earlier quoted context omitted.
Ah, sorry, I was editing while you responded. > You're not going to see AlphaFold write compelling science fiction. Yes? But not many biology PhDs do that either. > I'm talking about, which is building a model that forms its own hypothesis, designs its own experiments, and contributes to the wide and deep wealth of knowledge that, crucially, goes well beyond the scope of its training data. A few weeks ago we saw LLMs…
I'm happy to leave the conversation here. I don't necessarily disagree with what you're saying, but we appear to be making different points, or at least at different levels of description, and it's not really productive anymore.
Have a good weekend :)