[falcolas]

Yeah, less collaborative art, and more a competition between bots.

In the beginning (and for some of the smaller subreddits), it was people building art. But for the most recognizable pieces, there were simply hundreds of bots enforcing a provided image.

[devwastaken]

Thats not entirely true. Many of the art pieces changed over time, and when the reddit servers became overloaded, the bots broke for a while because they actually had to query the server for every single pixel. When I tried https://github.com/grind086/PlaceBot It worked for a while, but if you're trying to use multiple accounts, page throttling will get to you. I had to keep going back to each tab, and I had to use multiple browsers so they didn't share the login info.

I know in the art that I helped draw around around Rocket League, we changed the art around and added more stuff to it over time, and using bots made it slower for us. Pure determination and account-hopping is what worked for us.

[Raphmedia]

I can assure you that there were a lot of art pieces that were created and defended by hand.

[owlmirror]

How can you assure that?

[Raphmedia]

I was part of some of those. Unless there were people with scripts that were protecting other communities artworks without them asking, ours didn't use bots or scripts.

It was simply 100+ of us who told each others "alright, I'm protecting the pixel at xxx,yyy" and clicked that pixel all day all night.

[patcon]

While there is a hypothetical point on other experiments where I might agree that they're more bot than human, I would still consider this human art -- just bot-augmented.

To me, it's not more bot-created than a modern protest movement might be said to be Android- or Google- or Apple-created -- they are the extensions used to manifest a human will based on the combined creativity and values :)

[revscat]

Which is interesting in itself. You seem to think that the bot usage took away from the overall importance of the effort. I'm not sure I agree.

[falcolas]

I don't disagree that it's still interesting (if a bit boring after the first few frames of an animated representation of the progress). But a piece of art created by a few dozen people with machines, when compared to the expectation that a piece of art was created by a couple hundred thousand people by hand; well, it just doesn't have the same impact.

[patcon]

But the machines were only built and deployed as a reaction to human energies? If there were no people participating as they were, then no one would have gone to the efforts to build and run the bots. I feel your comment seems to gloss over how important the human factor was to bringing the more "mechanical" part into existence :)

EDIT: speaking of which, I wonder if reddit could use some of the data from this to detect sockpuppet network on reddit... I imagine communities of a certain type might have engaged (or not) with this phenomenon in a very different way than others

[problems]

It definitely does, viewing it as "collaborative art" when really it's just a bunch of people running bots to smash other people's shit turns it from "art" to a popularity contest of standard internet practice pretty fast.

[zzalpha]

Bots created by people...

... I assume.

[falcolas]

... I hope. :)

[artichokeheart]

I'm sure you have some proof to back your claims.

[falcolas]

When every user is limited to updating a single pixel every few minutes, how else could any group of mere mortals create and maintain such a large picture of the Mona Lisa? It's not visually easy to see vandalism on such a complex construct, so expecting that mere people were able to almost instantly identify and fix graffiti is folly.

And that's just one highly complex piece which evaded defacement.

[bbctol]

You do realize all of these images started out as templates? Like, someone created a pixelized version of the Mona Lisa, then told the users of a subreddit "Go make this at these coordinates." This art wasn't generated spontaneously, but it was made and defended by humans.

[Klathmon]

Well it's actually pretty simple.

They created grids and coordinate numbers that told the groups what each and every pixel should be colored.

Then all anyone that wanted to "help" had to do was just look at the grid, and pick a pixel that was wrong to fix.

Like you said, each user had plenty of time in between pixel placements to look at the map and choose their next "fix".

[endorphone]

Did the tool provide grid coordinates? I don't recall that. Are there any references to subreddits or other locations actually coordinating these things?

Because the way the US flag appeared certainly looks artificial.

[Klathmon]

[0] was the thread for how to help with the mona lisa.

There were tools being distributed, but they were more to help with placement and location, they didn't do anything for you

[0] https://www.reddit.com/r/MonaLisaClan/comments/630qjq/mona_l...

[falcolas]

Given the history of trolls defacing such mutable works of art, and their success at doing so (and how people get quite bored/frustrated at fixing it), I find this explanation a bit lacking. I'm sure there were many people interested in helping, but to counter vandalism on such a grand scale, for such a long period of time? Human nature doesn't seem to back that up.

I may very well be wrong: people can and do get together and help with grand pieces of art; but Occam's razor points me towards a smaller number of people running bots.

[rhencke]

When r/place was running, things divided into factions as art was placed, and subreddits were even formed dedicated to creating or maintaining a piece of artwork. There were a _lot_ of people, myself included, who really enjoyed being able to do their little part to create something bigger, or maintain it. It was only running for a few days, and was new and interesting for a lot of folks.

Not to say there weren't bots, but keep in mind you could only place one pixel at most every 5 minutes, per user, and that new users weren't allowed to place pixels at all, to discourage people from amassing users just to draw things.

[Klathmon]

But it's not like only the "creators" could run bots, the "vandals" could as well. so even if you really truly believe it was mostly run by bots, you are still back to square 1 in that you'd need many people working together for a single purpose to get anything other than noise.

But you also need to remember that for the most part the vandals were unorganised. If you got a small group to choose a small spot on the massive canvas, they could get something together in 15 minutes or so, whereas it would take vandals much longer (unless they could somehow organise to completely wipe out one small part).

Even bots were still subject to the same rules.

Edit: here is the post on reddit that helped coordinate the mona lisa https://www.reddit.com/r/MonaLisaClan/comments/630qjq/mona_l...

No mention of bots, the only software being an overlay to help with picking the right pixels.