You can crucify me if you want. I do enjoy some AI art. Typically “setting” art. Like, some location or other. AI has a knack for making the location seem real, but also kind of surreal, like locations we experience in dreams. Could be real, but there’s some small details that add up to make it kind of not real.
Clearly I’m aware actual artists can create the same effect, but AI really nails that vibe.
Bottom line is it’s here to stay and I don’t hate every aspect of it. It’s like anything else, it needs to be regulated to prevent destroying actual artist’s creativity and livelihoods.
Bottom line is it’s here to stay
Why do you talk like an AI?
AI has a knack for making the location seem real, but also kind of surreal
ah yes the uncanny valley.
You’re getting some hate, guess I’ll take a little too. There are two AI creations I follow, and it’s always in the back of my mind when watching them that they’re AI, that would be incredibly difficult and costly to make even as short as the stories are. They’re incredibly detailed visually, and the stories are darkly entertaining. The story and writing are written by humans and edited by them, but the visuals are all AI. They must put a ton of effort into programming the output to maintain stylistic integrity, it’s completely consistent, something the vast majority of AIgen stuff I’ve seen completely fails at. IMO these are what AIgen is for, they have to employ a decent number of people to maintain the output that has to come close to a small studio of CGI creators for something similar.
I’ve recently heard some AI Music that is objectively just good.
Like it sounds real, feels real, the lyrics have deep meaning, and so on. I hate it, and wish it didn’t exist. But fact is “I hate AI art because it’s bad art” just doesn’t really make sense anymore. You can hate it for many other reasons but the quality of the product is very good.
But fact is “I hate AI art because it’s bad art” just doesn’t really make sense anymore.
No, it’s because it isn’t art.
Good luck with that.
Define art for me?
I don’t have to. Wikipedia has a good enough definition:
Art is a diverse range of cultural activity centered around works utilizing creative or imaginative talents, which are expected to evoke a worthwhile experience, generally through an expression of emotional power, conceptual ideas, technical proficiency, or beauty.
An LLM generating output isn’t “cultural activity” no matter how much that concept could be tortured, and it doesn’t have “creative or imaginative talents”, because it isn’t sapient or sentient.
So true babe, ai certainly has had 0.0 cultural impact
Nah idk, people usually say separate Art from the Artist but I genuinely think that doesnt always apply even if it Applied Most of the time. Think dxvid who impregnated and killed Off a Minor: I thought his music was okay and then After hearing what he did I literally cant listen to his music anymore even tho I would still listen to other controversial artists (say, the kill from jared leto, although I started listening less to it).
My point is even the dumbest fucking idiot can make what you call „quality“ slop so why would you listen to their stuff & look at their Art when you can do it yourself instead of supporting a fucking idiot
You dont have to hate it but you hate it too Little imo
I guess.
If my eyes see something they like, then I’m lying to myself and living in denial if I don’t accept that I like what I’m seeing.
I can hate how shit people are using a tool for nefarious reasons while still liking some of what the tool can be used to create. Kind of like the internet itself, I suppose.
humans can come up with
Let me stop you right there. This is almost too absurd to be a Onion article…
What was 2/2?
I actually closed my eyes and took a moment to prepare myself after reading the first sentence because I knew I was about to read the most brain-dead take imaginable.
They can’t even form basic logical opinions anymore.
Many if them couldn’t before AI, which is why it’s so crazy good un their view.
Maybe most people feel discouraged from trying art because they think it needs to be good enough to get likes and shares online. If people were more encouraging to beginner artists or people who just don’t have time then maybe the average person wouldn’t care as much about AI art
The only reason people think they need likes and shares online for their art to be valid is because social media companies have been carefully and intentionally crafting that obsession with online recognition and growing numbers. This isn’t a “people aren’t nice to beginner artists” issue, because trust me nobody is kinder and more welcoming than the art community to newbies. Its a corporate social media issue.
Imagine if people were going to the gym with a robot and having it lift weights for them. Then, they would post about how many reps they did. And then you said “Hey, maybe if people encouraged beginners to lift weights more, then they wouldn’t be using the weight-lifting robot!”
There’s a lot more going on here. The people using AI don’t even understand what the assignment is.
You’re comparing apples and oranges a bit here. Sure, using a robot to lift weights at the gym is analogous to using AI to create art, if your goal is to get better at being an artist.
But if you’re a person with no painting or drawing skills who uses AI as a way to express your ideas visually, it would be a little more akin to being a shitty machinist who uses Sketchup and a 3D printer to manifest their mechanical ideas in meatspace.
99% of AI “art” is absolutely a cringey slopfest, but I’m not going to lie and pretend I can’t relate at all to people who use it as a tool to supplement their own practical deficiencies. Whether art should be more about the output or the process is a whole other philosophical debate…
That philosophical debate doesn’t matter here, because with AI both the process and the output are worse than useless
But if you’re a person with no painting or drawing skills who uses AI as a way to express your ideas visually, it would be a little more akin to being a shitty machinist who uses Sketchup and a 3D printer to manifest their mechanical ideas in meatspace.
It’s akin to getting somebody else to do it for you. Map out the workflow of hiring an artist to produce art for you. Then, map out the workflow of using an LLM to produce it for you. It’s the same workflow.
IMO you need to work to become an artist, seeing alone is a skill you need to work on for example, so no newbie will be helped with prompting AI images, how on earth could they?
But real art is not being sold for plebs with the promise of sticking it to “millionaire” artists that are all “full of themselves”.
“From a distance, Portrait of Edmond de Belamy, which has just sold at Christie’s in New York for $432,000 (£337,000), looks almost plausible. Up close, however, the paintwork becomes a grid of mechanical-looking dots, the man’s face a golden blur with black holes for eyes. Look into those eyes. They show no sign of feeling or life. Did a computer make this? The answer is yes. The first artwork generated by AI to be sold at Christie’s, its impressive price would seem to suggest that in future we will get computers to make art for us. Robot van Gogh will harmlessly cut its ear off and robot Picasso will be a genius, minus the misogyny. Is this the future AI art visionaries such as the French collective Obvious, which programmed this “painter” by getting it to compare its own work with 15,000 pre-20th century portraits, have in mind? Or are they just, God forbid, making a fast buck from gullible art collectors? Because believing the algorithm that knocked this up to be in any meaningful way an “artist” is like thinking your voice-interaction programme is out to get you. Dream on. Computers would need to replicate human consciousness before they could replicate the funny thing humans do called “art”. Art is a way in which human consciousness expresses itself, and is equally true of the earliest cave art, Rembrandt’s portraits and Duchamp’s urinal. And that is what is missing from Portrait of Edmond Bellamy. Art is a way humans communicate ideas, perceptions and feelings to each other. It has no existence outside the human passion to communicate. So in what meaningful sense can an AI replica of certain physical traits of old master paintings be called art? For a robot to really make art, it would need an autonomous mind that was emotional as well as rational. No AI developer has yet claimed to be anywhere near achieving that and if they ever do, their creation will probably have better things to do than paint portraits – like destroy humanity. Maybe afterwards robots will invent their own kind of art, but it won’t be some poor pastiche of human genius. It will be beyond anything we organics could imagine."
I suspect this was made with the whole “Art collection as tax avoidance scheme” thing in mind.
AI art also helps keep starving artists unfed
Yes, my middle schooler was going to hire a team of artists to create minion memes and dogs kung-fu fighting if not for AI.
Or, you know, your middle schooler can just draw silly things like we all did growing up.
I’ll pass along your suggestion
The algorithm rejected you.
I’ve seen what makes them cheer.
Weird way to brag that your child will not only always be a talentless hack, but won’t even try.
Weird way to dunk on a child.
Yeah, it’s totally the child’s fault that they aren’t learning anything, and not the parent’s. Why would parent ever be obligated to teach their child, right?
I would ask your parents if they could explain to you what a meme is and why you would find them in a meme community.
You’re going to have a stroke if you read every meme as if it were reality. There’s no middle schooler, the cute dog or cat isn’t actually asking to has cheeseburger it is a human writing a caption on a picture and Gigachad isn’t a real person.
I’m sorry to be the person to have to tell you all this.
That joke doesn’t work, I’m not in a wheelchair and that’s the important fact about the joke.
not trying because there’s an easier way is considered smart, actually. that’s basically how most of human civilization progressed. not keeping with tradition, but trying new ways.
Ah yes, peak human ingenuity:
Also forgetting how to think because ChatGPT does that for you.
Making it as an artist was always difficult, because the way artists are paid under capitalism favors giving all the money to a few big artists, who ironically aren’t necessarily even that good.
a few big artists, who ironically aren’t necessarily even that good.
I get your point and all, but I just had to ask - how do you define and separate ‘good’ from ‘bad’ art, though?
I agree with you though, the traditional art world is no different from any other industry under capitalism. It’s filled with sharks, ass kissing and networking. Most either come from fame, and/or from a wealthy family who’s willing to support them. It’s more important to be a driven entrepreneur with good social skills and the right connections, than an artist.
how do you define and separate ‘good’ from ‘bad’ art, though?
It’s partly subjective. Think the quality of the craftsmanship. For example, for paintings, whether the perspective makes sense. Or the shading. Or in literature, whether the story in internally consistent (I think the term is verisimilitude). Of course, all rules have exceptions.
More like, it favors giving the money all the people who make a living off of what the artist produces.
Its like a factory. The artists are the workers at the bottom who actually produce and make the art work. Then there are the managers who promote the art and their bosses who sit at the top, running the factory. It is always those who benefit off of other people’s hard work who get to enjoy the fruits of other people’s labor.
Artists are why publishing houses exist and the reason why editors have a job in the first place, but it is the editors who drive nice cars and live in nice houses while the artists who draw and write the very books the publishers sell, get to enjoy getting paid so little that they can’t make a living off of it.
If you look in places like the animation industry, you can point to any of the big animators who helped make Disney big in the 90s and you will see that none of them can get work. None. New animators have no chance. Artists who have been in the business for 20 or 30 years, who are responsible for the movies that defined a generation are jobless and if they get a job, it is the kind of entry level gig that you’d normally only give to a recent graduate.
Illustration had been fucked for decades. They are getting paid the same as in the 80s, but not adjusted for inflation. More often than npt they get offered jobs for exposure and when they land gigs that pays, it will be two months work for one week’s pay. Asking for more money is not an option. There are no unions. All they can do is work faster to maybe make the low pay worth it. Meanwhile their editors live in gleaming mansions.
You might end up being one of the lucky few scammers in fine art who become rich people’s favourite, but that is a completely different world from the commercial art industry. People work themselves into early graves. There’s a reason why Berserk’s crestor died in his 50s.
Back problems, wrist problems, eye problems, weight problems. And these are passionate souls, which is why it is so easy to take advantage of them and their skills. Most people in the animation industry burn out before they’re 40. You don’t see many middle aged artists in the industry today. Some end up teaching. Most leave the industry all together when those who benefit from their hard work has sucked every bone dry.
The higher ups get fat bonuses. They live the great life. Not a creative bone in their body, but they make a living on the piles and piles of passionate souls who will be eaten up and spit out with nothing to show for it.
That is the life of the artist.
The very, very few ones who rise to the top are often those who have a rich family member or spouse to finance their artistic endeavors. Illusteators, painters, authors, animators, you name it. More often than not, the ones who do well and are successful, have no real financial problems in their lives because their loved ones got them covered.
It’s easy to make an amazing piece of art when you don’t have to worry about money.
Artists are why publishing houses exist and the reason why editors have a job in the first place, but it is the editors who drive nice cars and live in nice houses
I agree with most of what you said, but I think most editors don’t make that much. It’s the corporate heads (i.e. the editor’s bosses) who get paid - the MBAs who’ve been put there to squeeze maximum profit at minimum cost.
My goal all through junior high and high school was to become a comic book artist. I’m still sad I never made it because I missed out on the opportunity to help Stan Lee achieve a net worth of $70 million.
I hate Matisse but apparently just because they use his trash to money laund he’s some sort of genius.
Yeah, like the Renaissance before capitalism! Let me check my notes, oh, uh, looks like “all the money to a few big artists” was the thing then as well.
this_engine_is_a_capitalist.jpg
Hey, that’s not all it does! It uses all the water so they remain unhydrated as well! As well as all the electricity to keep them unpowered, and ruin the sleep for everyone within a 60 km2 square radius, so they also are being kept unrested. Jeez this is the dumbest timeline. By a lot
60 km2 square radius
Dude here lives in a 6D space.
No that’d be 60km² hexagonal radius, right?
Afaics they measure ‘area’ in km4, and I assume the ‘surface’ is one dimension lower than the total dimensionality of space.
Engagement farming? I refuse to believe the top person is for real
Also Youtube feed is the videos they haven’t watched, so isn’t in their mind (yet)
Reading every single tweet you ever see through the lense of “they get paid to create engagement” really ellucidates why people say the things they say.
Sad as it is, I much prefer that worldview to thinking that people really are this stupid
Top guy doesn’t even have the checkmark you need to monetise on xitter tho…
Something ive noticed about AI art is it enables people who see themselves as “idea guys” to pump out every thought they have, call it good enough, and display it proudly like they worked hard at it.
When you make are you take an idea and that idea is shaped by external factors. Your skill level, your medium, how you collaborate if you are, all of these things influence what you make and that influence in turn changes your ideas. You may have an idea of what you want to paint, and during the process of painting come to appreciate the beauty of texture, and the next painting seeks to explore not just your idea but what you can do with the medium. Artists usually seek to push themselves to learn and explore and have their art change them as much as they seek to create the art.
But an idea guy only has interest in the idea. He doesnt want to do the process, he has no desire to be changed by his work. He has an idea and he wants an end product, and AI allows him to bypass that pesky learning to draw/paint/create business. It removes limitations in medium and skill level and apita out something close enough to his idea that its serviceable.
And I think that, to me, really signifies how much the idea guy values ideas over everything else. It takes all the work out of creation, and the lack of craftsmanship in the ideas is very telling in the final product.
This guy understands art.
It’s autotune for business majors.
Mostly agreed, but you’re putting the person who creates an AI image into a box.
I may make an AI image for personal reasons and because I can’t do anything more than rudimentary Photoshop, and even then I have to have a starting image.
My art lies elsewhere. We could spend two hours while I show you around my house, show you all the things I’ve created.
I get your Point but even as someone whos like you in that Aspect (not good at Images) that just Sounds a bit lazy
People who make one kind of art can undervalue another kind.
Yep, it’s been real disappointing seeing musicians and writers use AI album/book covers
There is also art without any idea, where the artist simply went with the flow. And there is commission work where the idea isn’t the artist’s. Also I think “idea” might sell short what someone has: an idea can be super highlevel leaving a lot of freedom to how it is represented, or that person can have a very detailed result in their mind they would like to bring onto paper or into sound or whatever.
On top it’s not like AI gives you an exact result. Quite the contrary; throw the same prompt at it a few times and you get different results. Potentially vastly different. So if you want an AI built representation of your idea, you still have to iterate and steer a lot until you get something that somewhat resembles what you had in mind. Besides having an idea, you also have to curate. But anyway, the process also shapes the result here; the constraints are different ones than for “real art”.
is the accumulation of one’s youtube feed truly the deepest gaze into the soul?
Around 825 AD, Persian scientist and polymath al-Khwarizmiwrote kitāb al-ḥisāb al-hindī (“Book of Indian computation”) and kitab al-jam’ wa’l-tafriq al-ḥisāb al-hindī (“Addition and subtraction in Indian arithmetic”). In the early 12th century, Latin translations of these texts involving the Hindu–Arabic numeral system and arithmetic appeared, for example Liber Alghoarismi de practica arismetrice, attributed to John of Seville, and Liber Algoritmi de numero Indorum, attributed to Adelard of Bath.[8] Here, alghoarismi or algoritmi is the Latinization of Al-Khwarizmi’s name;[9] the text starts with the phrase Dixit Algoritmi, or “Thus spoke Al-Khwarizmi”.
So in referring to what someone’s true soul is, you can say “Thus spoke The Algorithm”
Naaah. Nowadays YouTube just represents the pinnacle of enshittification. Not something I’d admit publicly to using.
My Youtube feed is utter shit. I watch one One Piece theory video, and that is all Youtube starts recommending. I watch one trauma video and that is all my feed shows. Youtube is so annoying nowadays, more akin to dementia addled mind with ADHD.
Pro tip for YouTube: don’t use the main feed. Instead, look at the recommendations under an interesting video for other ones that catch the eye, and save them into ‘watch later’ playlists by topic.
Also, don’t watch random videos under the main account, open an incognito tab for that. With these two approaches combined, YouTube gives me some great recs, especially for music.
The kinds of videos I always make sure to watch in a private tab are things like:
- viral videos
- videos recommended by a friend
- “how do I fix this broken toilet” videos, or something else that I need once and won’t ever look at again
With that approach, my recommended videos feed is still trash, but at least it’s vaguely on-topic trash. I don’t get recommended 500 plumbing videos because one time I needed to know how to fix my toilet. It doesn’t take the fact that I watched a video that 500 million people also watched as meaning “I want to watch all the popular videos” or “I have the same tastes as everybody else who watched this video”.
I can always tell when I screwed up and watched an off-topic video in my normal account because the recommendations go to shit for a while.
It’s also important to do the same with links from social media.
You can go into your yt history and delete videos and it will fix the recommendations
I deleted my whole history last week, and within a day YouTube was recommending me anime openings for things I have not had any interest in for 10 years. I’m pretty sure it’s at least partially bullshit.
I ended up just deleting my whole Google account. I’m making do with an RSS reader and yt-dlp for now, but I’m already so fed up with that whole process that I’m making a simple QT app that does the RSS reading and yt-dlp calling for me. Akregator fucking sucks, by the way. Every time I shut down my PC without closing Akregator first, it loses its shit and does not remember any read statuses.
I just browse on incognito (without an account). The home page is blank every time.
Yeah. Fuck YouTube and everything, but it’s still possible to curate a decent feed.
Yeah they are sure pushing some things really hard, while I have to reclick on videos I have already seen so that theme doesn’t vanish, like some stupid algorithm.
I browsed some music on youtube on a fresh, logged out device a few days ago and it was so refreshing to get recommendations based the video I’m currently watching. Like 15 years ago. Now, if I’m logged in, the recommendations next to the playing video are the same ones as on the landing page, utterly useless.
It is when a person’s depth is measured in teaspoons.
Yes, absolutely. If you look at my history, it shows nothing but repeated watches of the dog of wisdom.
Says a lot about me, I think.
It is to a smoothbrained techbro.
YouTube keeps pushing right wing and pseudoscience to my feed even though I have marked “Do not recommend the channel”, blocked them, reported them, and sent feedback saying the “Do not recommend” doesn’t work.
just being in a certain demographic will do that
I think what it pushes on me is bad, but then occasionally I look at it with a fresh account or an account I never use. The suggestions it gives for new accounts is awful. Mostly it’s just absolute brain rot content. It’s stuff that makes “Ow My Balls!” look thoughtful.
Even if I’m not interested in 95% of what the YouTube algorithm suggests, at least with my actual account it tends not to suggest things that are actually offensive to me.
It seems to me like there’s a lot of “engagement bait” in the suggestions it gives. Sometimes that’s good, in that it’s stuff you’ll engage with because you actually find it interesting. Other times it’s stuff that keeps you engaged because it makes you angry or something. It doesn’t distinguish between “You’ll love this video!” and “You’ll hate this video, but you’ll watch the whole thing!”
But, I don’t think we can discount that a lot of people who watch YouTube are absolute idiots who have 2 living brain cells remaining. Any time your feed gets a suggestion based on what other people are engaging with, it’s inevitably going to be terrible.
Get FreeTube and never sign in again. Only get served videos from channels you subscribe to (in the app, not on your account)
This is what traditional art reveals. And quite well.
Couple of years ago I was at a cannabis painting event (get stoned whilst painting), with my friend. I’ve got some experience drawing and sketching, very little with painting. My friend has very little experience in anything art related, yet whilst I was struggling to figure out what to paint he manages to make a lovely blend of colours and themes, in ways I never could. I was looking at it for a good while, and it had so many lovely elements. He kept thinking his wasn’t good!
He would’ve never been able to make that with AI, it would have missed all that nuance.
I chose to believe this happened. Jaden Smith has at least one friend and they were impressed with the art their friend made.
I will carry this story in my heart and retell it at the next paint and sip I go to.
If you’ve had very little experience with painting, how do you know how good you would be at it? Your friend might have a natural talent, but that doesn’t mean that you couldn’t learn how.
This is true. I’ll be going to Amsterdam again soon, and I’m hoping there’s another event at the time.
Natural talent is a myth, it’s like believing that you shouldn’t think about what you’re doing to paint loose.
It’s all hard work, and maybe in the end you can split up artists by talent, but until then it’s just who have learned the most.
Prodigies exist. Some people learn faster than others, and some have ability that’s just leaps and bounds beyond anybody else. This is independent of hard work, but somebody who has talent but doesn’t do the hard work isn’t going to be very good. At one end of the bell curve are people who just aren’t going to get it no matter what, and prodigies are at the other end. Most people are in the middle: they can become technically proficient with hard work, but they’ll never be as good as a prodigy who works just as hard.
I disagree, with the exception that some learn faster (which isn’t “prodigy”).
Even the masters spent years, even decades training before creating their masterpieces. They copied, they failed, but above all, they worked hard for years to become good.
Of course the masters worked hard. I’m saying that no matter how hard you work, you aren’t going to become Mozart or Einstein. Hard work is important, but it also isn’t the only factor.
That sounds like a lot of fun
It’s quite a nice event, they try to do them weekly unless something comes up. They sometimes do stoner pottery, or design your own bongs with the erm, right type of paint I would presume lol. I don’t want it to sound like advertising, so if you are planning a trip to Amsterdam send me a message and I can give the website/socials :)
Seems like a fundamental misunderstanding of what AI art is.
I just wished to drop here a novel from old times…
Ooh, I forgot it was Gogol that wrote that one, thank you, it’s marvelous!
timely! you should post this to [email protected]
If someone wants to know the weird shit people have on their minds you just have to find their social media timeline, especially Reddit, Tumblr or Fedi. Or, like, talk to them.
Given the flavour of weird shit in someone’s head most AI wouldn’t even slop anything like that. Like, I’m thinking of three shrimps having a raging threesome right now with Jim Carrey’s head in the background watching one shrimp-dick explode. The AI would probably refuse or just make Carrey sit in front of a meal.
Thank you for that vibrant mental image
I challenge any AI to come up with a comment like this.
