- cross-posted to:
- technology@lemmy.world
- comicstrips@lemmy.world
- cross-posted to:
- technology@lemmy.world
- comicstrips@lemmy.world
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I feel like some promises were broken 😂
tl;dr - “art” generated by LLMs is ultimately lame and uninspiring. It’s probably never going to inspire people very much. It’s a parlor trick and everyone intrinsically recognizes it. Don’t expect to be taken seriously as a creator if this is your primary tool.
I am skeptical about “never”, but right now I agree that’s true. I expect it to be true for many years to come. That being said, we have seen a lot of improvement (over even the last few months) in AI image quality, composition, and prompt adherence.
this reminded me that old Chuck Jones comic in which he encourages young artists to find what works for them instead of trying to fit in.
Pregnant Mario lactating Jamba juice all over Blanka from street fighter, indeed.
Gotta say, he lost me at the talent-skill thing. Being good at any arts requires something fundamental. Practise is absolutely an important part of it, but art, music, storytelling, anything creative, either you got it or you dont.
Edit : is the down arrows because talent isnt real, or because I said he and mistakenly did a misgendering?
Some of the best artists I know are people who started out without a single iota of talent, but they practiced for long enough that they got good. I reckon that talent probably does exist, but it’s a far smaller component than many believe. Hard word beats talent when talent doesn’t work hard.
People who are most likely to emphasise talent in art tend to be people who wish they were good at art, but aren’t willing (or able) to put the time into improving; it feels oddly reassuring to tell oneself that it’s pointless to try if you don’t start out with talent, rather than being realistic and saying “I wish I were good at art, but I am choosing not to invest in that skill because it’s not one of my priorities”
Maybe, but i feel the amount of effort I put in before giving up should have yielded a lot more results than it did. I dont want to come across as bitter, because its just art, but i really do think some people just cant.
If Mozart can be writing unrivalled symphonies at 8 years old you know. Most people will play a single instrument for longer than he was alive and come nowhere close, and its frustrating to learn that the general consensus is that this is simply because everyone else just needs to try harder.
To me, a big part of it is that I’m tired of commodity art. I don’t care about your pretty pixel soup. I’ve seen other pixel soups before that were similarly pretty.
And I’ve been tired for many years, long before every middle-manager under the sun could cook up their own pretty pixel soup.
Back then, it was humans trying to make a living off of their passion and then settling for commodity art to make ends meet. I was cheering them on, because they were passionate humans.Now that generative AI has destroyed that branch of humanity, there’s no one to cheer on anymore.
Even if generative AI never existed in the first place, I’d like to see commodity art being relegated to the sidelines and expressive art coming into the limelight instead.Tell me a story with your art. About your struggles or a brainfart you had, or really anything. This comic is great, for example. There’s emotions there and I can see the human through the art. I would’ve chosen a very different illustration for whatever, for example, which tells me a lot about the artist, but also about myself.
I have never had that kind of introspection with pretty pixel soups.I find this li’l guy hilarious for some reason.
I have never seen particular humans expressing themselves in ai art or music, all i see is the tech company model behind it; be it sora, stable diffusion or mid journey, ai is not a tool for the prompters; the prompters are the tool for the AI model.
I like this take. It sums up the reality of AI quite well.
There are difficult ‘AI’ tools.
Look up controlnet workflows or VACE, just to start, much less little niches in vapoursynth pipelines or image editing layers. You could spend days training them, messing with the implementation, then doing the manual work of carefully and deliberately applying them. This has, in fact, has been happening in film production for awhile, just in disguise.
Same with, say, LLMs used in game mods where appropriate, like the Rimworld mod. That’s careful creative expression.
…As usual, it’s tech bros fucking everything up by dumbing it down to zero-option prompt box and then shoving that in front of as many people as possible to try and monopolize their attention.
In other words, I agree with the author that what I hate about ‘AI art’ is the low effort ‘sloppiness.’ It’s gross, like rotten fast food. It makes me sad. And that’s 99.999% of all AI art.
…But it doesn’t have to be like that.
It’s like saying the concept of the the fediverse sucks because Twitter/Facebook suck, even if 99.999% of what folks see is the slop of the later. It’s not fair to the techniques, and it’s not holding the jerks behind mass slop proliferation accountable.
Precisely. AI art is bad because the users making “art” with it essentially have such bad taste they’ll publish anything the AI shits out.
There exist artistic ways to use AI as a tool, but none of them are easy. In fact they might be harder than just painting the damn picture yourself.
The Oatmeal! 😍😍 I haven’t been to that site in so long, I’m so glad they’re still around! Thanks for sharing!
Growing up my mother had (still has come to think of it) a book about Wyeth at the Kuerner family farm. The Wyeth picture in the Oatmeal story is not part of the larger collection of works all from that farm, but it still has the feeling. I can’t reccomend people looking into Wyeth and his art high enough
Art is beautiful not because economic value has been captured and skewered into aesthetics. It is a part of being human.
Yea, I agree. It is like the anti-ai art luddites don’t understand this… The people making the promps are still making art, just by the nature of it being humans making human decisions. Skill isn’t a gate to art in the same way anymore, despite what the gatekeepers want everyone to believe.
Are you the type of person who pretends you made a cheeseburger when you got it from a drive though window? Because that’s what you sound like.
Prompters don’t make decisions in the piece, the algorithm generated stuff and if the prompter doesn’t like it, then they prompt again. No choices made.
It’s like how you all use the same words when someone disagrees with you, “luddite” and “gatekeeping”. You can’t really think for yourself so your regurgitate what someone else wrote.
People using prompts are not “making” art. They are hallucinating theft from actual artists. There never was any skill or materials gate. Pen or pencil and a scrap of paper., pick it up and start. There is no defense for AI “art” or the shills that push it.
There is nothing new under the sun, even artists who draw their own stuff learn from other artists and use it in their art. AI training isn’t theft as long as the art is free to look at, that is just sour grapes. Torrenting anything and using it either as inspiration for your own work, or for training AI is theft and shouldn’t be done by anybody, but especially not corporations. Either way, it isn’t the training that is theft.
If you use summary tools on google to make you a list or a paragraph you’re ripping off actual writers and stealing their collective style. (Language models don’t just come from nowhere after all) Spell check is ok, but if you write like you’re borderline illiterate, well, pick up a grammar book and a notepad and get cracking. Hire a professional editor to plan your next set of PowerPoint slides.
Sheesh.
Prompting does not make anything, it is like saying you cooked a meal because you picked it in a vending machine.
It is more like writing a recipee down and giving it to a chef who uses their skill to interpret the recipe and make a new dish. The dish doesn’t belong wholly to the chef, despite the skill nearly wholly residing with the chef. The person who wrote the recipee isn’t a chef, but they are involved in making the dish that was their idea.
Yeah but we don’t say “I made these cookies” when all we did was hand someone the recipe, now do we?
No, because telling someone or something to make something doesn’t mean we get to say we made it.
So you are saying that the person who made the recipe had no input to the process of cooking the resultant food? Nobody claims they “drew” something when they design an AI prompt. When you see a Frank Lloyd Write building do you say, "Nah he didn’t build that, he just made some plans. A contractor built it. Frank Lloyd Write isn’t an artist, he is just a prompt writer. "
Found the tool!
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Okay, I’m willing to accept that we generally shouldn’t decide that our personal lines in the sand can serve as meaningful differentiators between art and not-art. By the same token, don’t expect me to be particularly impressed by a (mostly) photorealistic composition just because you spent 30 minutes fine-tuning your prompt. If I’m not appreciating your skill and the time you committed to your vision, the bar for the impact you need to make is that much higher. For me, most AI art falls flat on that front as well.
Maybe someone will be the breakthrough artist that shows the rest of us luddites what a genuinely beautiful interplay between drafting a prompt and massaging an engine will look like, but (1) even that person is something other than a painter or a photographer, and (2) I don’t think we’re there yet and may never be.
That is at least reasonable. I really don’t expect you to be impressed by anybody’s efforts in AI prompting. Calling it not-art is subjectively wrong, but not being impressed is right in most cases.
art - the expression or application of human creative skill and imagination
Not-art is subjectively right. AI “art” is made by taking imagery and reassembling it according to an algorithm. There’s no thought, no imagination, no anything creative behind it. Can it be aesthetically pleasing? Sure, like a sunset can be. But neither are art because there’s no intention behind it.
Where is this definition from? Somewhere official, or your own personal definition?
I don’t like ai-art, most of the time it is a pursuit of the economic value of an aesthetic without a genuine engagement with the human part.
Further, AI is part of a broad process of dehumanization that diminishes the value of humans and the human condition in favor of an imagined intelligence that all artists have always instinctually understood was a threat.
No artists with any wisdom at all thinks skill is a gatekeeper for human artists, skill is rather the inveitable result of a sustained intimacy between an artist and their art and what you mistake for a worship of skill is a love of that relationship framed in the context of skill. In so far as the obsession with artistic skill acts as a gatekeeper to anybody, it is in large part because capitalism demands things be abstracted and reduced to pure economic value. Artists rarely gatekeep art themselves, the gatekeeping has NOTHING to do with artists nor does it originate from their desire to create art it is a peripheral process imposed upon art by distorting forces attempting to control art (such as AI).
Also, people need to stop lazily using the example of Luddites without knowing their history. They aren’t who you think they were, stop dropping the reference like you know what it means if you don’t know what it means.
TL;DR If skill is a gatekeeper to art it is because capitalism demands scarcity be imposed upon the pursuit of making art, it has nothing to do with art itself. Hailing AI as a gift to would-be artists totally misses the point, I am not against using new tools to make art, I am against the rise in dehumanization dominating societies around the world at the moment of which AI is a central actor.
To me, thins kinda screams of “I suffered so you should too”. There are good arguments against AI art, but this one doesn’t resonate with me in any capacity.
It is good that AI has made art more accessible. Art is meant for everyone, and anything that makes it more democratic is great.
Its not really about the suffering, its about the journey that is unique to you that you cannot possibly share with others since you’ve never taken it, and so it reflects in the art you bring.
The thing about ai is that if it was perfect to make the image in your head appear on a screen, is that youd notice actually that the image in your head would be shit (its ok). Youd experience this if you did any art, and it takes both an artistic mind with good artistic skills to come up with an effective “medium” or “tool” “image” to transfer your idea to another human being’s mind. It takes a fluency that can’t be grasped unless you pick up one of the tools you’d use to make any art.
And the suffering part comes if you are forcing yourself do get the result you want. You can learn art without suffering, without feeling ashamed at your lack of skill if you arm yourself with patience, something that ai confirms to the audience and other people you don’t have, and so can’t possibly make any contribution to what we understand as art.
The suffering is brought on by this lack of patience about thinking HOW every stroke has to be measured and precise in like a Van Gogh’s painting (pointillism) to the pov and line art of that famous dio vs jonathan confrontation in jojo’s bizarre adventure, each form of art taking inspiration of art before it that an art enjoyer might be familiar with. But it doesn’t have to be, but it is since time in this world time is money, and less is afforded to us for every waste.
I am not shaming btw, I only learned to communicate in an adversarial way soz.
Oh, I know the struggle - it’s not that I never made any art whatsoever. What’s in the artist’s head is less of an image and more of an impression to be put into words.
And I believe that, given more truly free time and less of the simple mind-eating distractions, much more people would embark on an artistic journey, even in the age of AI. It’s just a very human thing to do.
But while we’re at it, we have what we have, and sometimes having a medium to express yourself right now is better than only having hope to get the tools you need.
There have been painters who are blind who made great paintings. People without hands who learned how to paint with their feet.
Art was already accessable to everyone, ai drones say that it wasn’t to feel better.
There are different kinds of accessibility. While I admire people with disabilities who were so dedicated in the pursuit of art, there’s more to it than pure desire.
Art takes gift. It takes a lot of time to make it into talent, skill. It commonly takes a lot of money for the courses, materials, etc. And in the modern world, not everyone can realistically have or afford all that.
When I talk of accessibility, I don’t mean “with a ton of effort, every person can technically become at least a bad artist”. I mean “everyone needs to create, yet not everyone can dedicate their life to it”.
AI art allows us to communicate our visions and ideas, which is to me the most important parts of art overall, without having to grind through art classes. This, in turn, means we can hear and see new voices, ones that previously were never heard.
You must have stopped reading halfway, because he makes your argument, too.
He acknowledges that it makes art more accessible, by removing the tedium so that artists can do the creative work.
If their “creative work” begins and ends with prompting the AI, the prompter is basically saying that all of the work of art making is tedium.
Does that not resonate with you ?
I did read it to the end, I just don’t believe it’s quite the same argument.
The Oatmeal seems to insist that while AI is helpful to eliminate the boring tasks, art is still a product of effort and struggle. They even later make an argument that these “boring, administrative” tasks might be an important part of creative process, that taking it away means taking something away from the art itself.
And AI art is not just text prompts and pictures. There are AI tools that allow you to draw basic lines and the AI will fill in and complete the hard parts, so you could male your vision come true without proper artistic skill. This is good, because not everyone can dedicate themselves to art classes, not everyone is talented enough (and I insist that talent is part of building a good skill, unlike The Oatmeal who seems to emphasize effort over gift), yet everyone wants and needs to create beauty.
To me, the main purpose of art is to communicate our vision, our thoughts, our ideas. Until recently, the ability to do so was limited by the talent, by that skill ceiling. Those who excelled were heard, those who did not were not. By assisting people with things they don’t know how to do well, we can amplify their voices and their visions, which can help us build a more active and inclusionary dialogue.
Until recently, the ability to do so was limited by the talent, by that skill ceiling. Those who excelled were heard, those who did not were not.
My dude, I have never seen someone shoot their argument in the foot so hard.
Have you seen The Oatmeal drawings?
You can put out creative effort and be successful without having to churn out a Sistine Chapel every time.
I read the whole thing, and no it didn’t resonate with me. I’m not a middle manager who sees himself as a story teller. Neither am I an art afficionado.
I don’t have a visceral emptiness that overwhelms me when I learn an image that was interesting was generated by AI. It didn’t come from a talented human? Who cares? Does it help to better articulate a thought or idea than the person trying to create it could do on their own? Then it’s ok with me.
There was a very reasonable web comic that made a clear point today in the Palestine community and rather than agree with the message and see that it was much better presented as a comic, it turned into “this smells like it could be slop!” People say “oh I wish it was just MS paint or shitty ppt because at least then YOU made it” but I would have to disagree and say it can detract from the message when you turn out something that looks like shit.
There’s more to the utility of AI art than minutiae. I would be willing to entertain the argument that I don’t want to see AI art in a museum, but while I find the oatmeal’s take to be a well considered perspective, a fair bit of the blanket hatred surrounding AI art applications on deranged.
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In photography, the photographer makes choices using lenses, lighting, framing and so on to make choices about how the image is created.
With Photoshop, the digital artist uses the tools to create and manipulate the image, making choices about how the image is created.
With AI, the prompter tells the computer what they want and no choices are made. The computer generates things with an algorithm and that’s it. The prompter doesn’t choose anything, they just make another prompt.
So yeah, prompters will never be artists, and I have more respect for a kid doodling in the dirt with a stick because they at least are making choices and making something.
It’s not gatekeeping, you’re just simply not making art, and no, you can’t sit with us.
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Walther Benjamin examines this point extensively in The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction, which should be required reading for everyone, but especially anyone who thinks that AI art is the same as human art. The crux is that an authentic work (you can think of it as the “original”) has some… thing , some Je ne sais quoi that he calls the Aura. It’s a feeling you get from the real authentic thing. It’s the reason people line up at the Louvre to see the tiny Mona Lisa behind thick plate glass instead of just looking at a poster. Or why NFTs tried to be a thing and basically failed after the meme of it all died out.
