| > 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 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. |
Those have a skill floor though, even if it is quite, quite low. If you can't manage to get the object you're trying to take a photo of in-frame, or manage to draw the thing you're trying to draw, there's no amount the tool can do to compensate for that.
> 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".
I mean it depends how you define crappy photographs. My phone camera is a tool, and I use that tool to document things for all manner of purposes. I wouldn't call those photos artistic in any way at all. It feels like you're deliberately saying "all photos are art, and most of them are bad" when I think the vast, vast, vast majority of those, including by the people who took them, would not be referred to as art.
> 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.
Agreed wholeheartedly. But, a working class person who has things they want to express artistically is going hit various walls with generative models very quickly, in much the same way I did. Like, if you feel a creative verve at all, I just can't fathom you looking at the wide assortment of all manner of tooling, and choosing the one where you're playing telephone with a toddler that paints over-smoothed, nonsensical photo-realistic pictures.
And again we go back to the notion that "the process is the point" and as a creative, I completely agree. There are certainly times I feel frustration at my tools and wish they would just make what the hell I'm trying to make, but if that was the entire process, I would get nothing from it. Figuring out what prompt will get you what kind of output is interesting, but it's not fulfilling.
> 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.
To be totally real I've never heard of someone drawing normal maps. I thought the traditional way you went about making those was having a high-detail model inside a low-detail one, and generating them that way.
> Someone not specializing to have fine-level technical skills in all relevant areas doesn't imply lack of creativity/interest at a broader scale.
It's not a matter of high or low skills, it's a matter of wanting skills and wanting easily made repetitive crap. If you're the kind of person who finds it fulfilling to slam text into one of these things and get your teddy bear smoking weed pictures, and that's all you want and are fulfilled, more power to you. I wouldn't personally call that art, nor would I find it nourishing to my creative spirit, I would say that's just instant gratification and there's absolutely nothing wrong with that. Now if you take that stuff and then go try to sell it... I mean that's your prerogative, I'm definitely not buying and I would encourage anyone else to just type a similar prompt into a generator and get it that way.