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by H1Supreme 653 days ago
> Art is notoriously hard to define, and so are the differences between good art and bad art.

Which makes ChatGPT (or whatever) just as valid as any tool for creating art.

> What I’m saying is that art requires making choices at every scale; the countless small-scale choices made during implementation are just as important to the final product as the few large-scale choices made during the conception.

As a life-long artist and musician, I agree with this. However, I find the artist's perspective lacking from this article. For many artists (myself included), the process is why we do it. It's truly therapeutic. I honestly cannot imagine my life without creative expression. Whether entering a prompt fulfills that for someone is up to them to decide. But, for me, it would remove the parts of creating art that give me joy.

2 comments

Mostly just highlighting how misinformed the author is. AI art tools are very much able to adjust small details
Same. I don't know if I would call myself an artist, despite creating art for... Jesus, most of my life at this point, and making a bit of cash off it, at least enough to cover the power bill each month. I went into programming because I was keenly aware of how hard it is to make a living as an artist (and getting harder all the time!) but like... I simply cannot fathom enjoying "prompt engineering" nearly as much as my current creative processes.

I've used AI generators a few times because they're interesting little toys, but fundamentally, a creative process is literally thousands of not millions of tiny decisions that are informed by other decisions. If anything, that's what I would call an "artist's voice" in any given creative product, is an at least somewhat consistent through-line through those decisions that gives the final piece the "life" that is so clearly missing from AI art, because all those millions of decisions, instead of being made by one or a few "voices," if you will, is replaced by millions of weighted-average decisions designed to reduce "error" in the product. It's quite literally soulless and people pick up on this, no matter how much the AI lovers want to scream Luddite at me, it's true.

That's not to say it's completely without purpose, I think this stuff is going to do gangbusters for corporate news pieces, blogs, spam sites, etc. If you want royalty free imagery to use for a thing, and don't give much of a shit about what it is, AI can handle that quite well. But I simply can't fathom someone with an intention, who wants to say something with an art piece using AI much, if at all.