[beezlebroxxxxxx]

> And, through the same lens, maybe human-created art is more interesting because it is real.

Conversations I have with people in real life almost always come back to this point. Most people find AI stuff novel, but few find it particularly interesting on an artistic level. I only really hear about people being ecstatic about AI online, by people who are, for lack of a better term, really online, and who do not have the skills, know-how, or ability, to make art themselves.

I always find the breathless joy that some people express at this stuff with confusion. To me, the very instant someone mentions "AI generated" I just instantly find it un-interesting artistically. It's not the same as photoshop or using digital art suites. It's AI generated. Insisting on the bare minimum human involvement as a feature is just a non-starter for me if something is presented as art.

I'll wait to see if the utopian vision people have for this stuff comes to fruition. But I have enough years of seeing breathless positivity for some new tech curdle into resignation that it's ended up as ad focused, bland, MBA driven, slop, that I'm not very optimistic.

[mattgreenrocks]

> I only really hear about people being ecstatic about AI online, by people who are, for lack of a better term, really online, and who do not have the skills, know-how, or ability, to make art themselves.

Yes, I've noticed this. The people who are excited about it usually come off as opportunistic (hence the "breathless joy"), and not really interested in letting whatever art/craft they want to make deeply change them. They just want the recognition of being able to make the thing without the formative work. (I hesitate to point this out, anticipating allegations of elitism.)

Plus, really online people tend to dominate online discussions, giving the impression that the public will be happy to consume only AI generated things. Then again, the public is happy to consume social media engagement crap, so I'm very curious what the revealed preference is here.

The value in learning this stuff is that it changes you. I'll be forever indebted to my guitar teacher partially because he teaches me to do the work, and that evidence of doing the work is manifest readily, and to play the long, long game.

[visarga]

> Insisting on the bare minimum human involvement as a feature is just a non starter for me if something is presented as art

You can make the guidance as superficial or detailed as you like. Input detailed descriptions, use real images as reference, you can spend a minute or a day on it. If you prompt "cute dog" you should expect generic outputs. If you write half a screen with detailed instructions, you can expect it to be mostly your contribution. It's the old "you're holding it wrong" problem.

BTW, try to input an image in chatGPT or Claude and ask for a description, you will be amazed how detailed it can get.

[beezlebroxxxxxx]

You need an image for an ad. You write a brief and send it to an artist who follows your brief and makes the image for you. You make more detailed briefs, or you make generic briefs. You receive an image. Regardless, did you make that image or just get a response to your brief?

You want a painting of your dog. You send the painter dozens of photos of your dog. You describe your dog in rapturous, incredible, detail. You receive a painting in response. Did you make that painting? Were you the artist in any normal parlance?

When you use chatGPT or Claude you're signing up to getting/receiving the image generated as a response to your prompt, not creating that image. You're involvement is always lessened.

You might claim you made that image, but then you would be like a company claiming they made the response to their brief, or the dog owner insisting they were the painter, which everyone would consider nonsensical if not plain wrong. Are they collaborators? Maybe. But the degree of collaboration in making the image is very very small.

[visarga]

> Did you make that painting? Were you the artist in any normal parlance?

The symphony conductor just waves her hands reading the score, does she make music? The orchestra makes all the sounds. She just prompts them. Same for movie director.

[maroonblazer]

The analogy isn't quite right. The conductor and director spend days collaborating with the symphony and the actors/crew. Parent's example is them literally prompting - via a creative brief - the artist or agency.

[chefandy]

The symphony conductor gets credit for being the conductor-- not for being Beethoven. A film director has a thousand times more influence on their final product than a conductor has on theirs, and they still don't try to take credit for the writing, costume, set design, acting, score, special effects, etc. etc. etc. I've yet to see stable diffusion spit out a list of credits after generating an image.

[chefandy]

It's still very different. What you describe is exactly what an art director does, which is creative and difficult— there's a good reason many commercial artists end their careers as art directors but none start there. Anybody that says making things that look good and interesting using generative AI is easy or doesn't require genuine creativity is just being a naysayer. However, at most, the art director is credited with the compilation of other people's work. In no situation would they claim authorship over any of the pieces that other people made no matter how much influence they had on them. This distinction might seem like a paperwork difference to people outside of the process, but it's not. Every stroke of the pen or stylus or brush, scissor snip, or pixel pushed is specifically informed by that artist's unique perspective based on their experience, internal state, minute physical differences, and any number of other non-quantifiable factors; there's no way even an identical twin that went to the same school and had the same work experience would have done it exactly the same way with the same outcome. Even using tools like Photoshop, which in professional blank-canvas art creation context use little to no automation (compared to finishing work for photography and such that use more of it.) And furthermore, you can almost guarantee that there's enough consistency in their distinctions that a knowledgeable observer could consistently tell which one made which piece. That's an artistic perspective— it's what makes a piece that artist's own piece. It's what makes something someone's take on the mona lisa rather than a forgery (or, copy I guess if they weren't trying to hide it) of the mona lisa. It's also what NN image generators take from artists. Artists don't learn how to do that— they learn broad techniques— their perspective is their humanity showing through in that process. That's what makes NN image generators learning process different from humans, and why it's can make a polaroid look like a Picasso in his synthetic cubist phase but gets confused about the upper limit for human limb counts. I think generative AI could be used to make statements with visual language, closer to design than art. I definitely think it could be used to make art by making images and then physically or digitally cutting pieces out and assembling them. But no matter how detailed you get in those prompts, there aren't enough words to express real artistic perspective and no matter what, your still working with other people's borrowed humanity usefully pureed and reformed by a machine. These tools are fundamentally completely different than tools like Photoshop. In art school I worked with both physical media and electronic media and the fundamental processes are exactly the same. Things like typography in graphic design are much easier, but you're still doing the same exact process and reasoning about the same exact things on a computer that you do working on paper and sending it to a "paste up man," as they did until the 80s/90s. People aren't just being sour pusses about this amazing new art tool— it's taking and reselling their humanity. I actually think these image generators are super neat — I use them to make more boards and references all the time. But no matter how specific I get with those prompts, I didn't make any of that. I asked a computer and that computer made it for me out of other people's art. A lot of people who are taken by their newfound ability to make polished images on command refuse to believe it, but it's true. It's a fundamentally different activity.

[visarga]

> your still working with other people's borrowed humanity usefully pureed and reformed by a machine

Exactly, isn't it amazing? You can travel the latent space of human culture in any direction. It's an endless mirror house where you can explore. I find it an inspiring experience, it's like a microscope that allows zooming into anything.

[chefandy]

Sure it's a lot of fun. I also find it very useful for some things like references and mood boards. No matter how granular you get with control nets or LORAs and how good the models get, you just can't get the specificity needed for professional work and the forms it gives you are just too onerous to mold into a useful shape using professional tools. It's still, fundamentally, asking another thing to make it for you, like work for hire or a commission. Software like Nuke's copycat tool or Adobe's background remover or content-aware fill were professionally useful right off the bat because they were designed for professional use cases. Even then, text prompt image generators are more useful than not in low-effort, high-volume use cases where the extremely granular per-pixel nuance doesn't really matter. I doubt they'll ever be useful enough for anything higher-level than that. It's just fundamentally the wrong interface for this work. It's like saying a bus driver on a specific route with a bus is equally useful to a cab driver with a cab. There are obviously instances where that's true, but no matter how many great things you can show are on that bus route, and no matter how many people it's perfectly suited for, there's just no way a FedEx driver could use it to replace their van.

[mrandish]

Very well said. Agree completely.

[arrobbiato]

Just keying on one comment here, which perhaps no one will read:

I was, in fact, a paste-up man in the early 1990s, slapping together copy and ads for a magazine. As such, I was a ping-pong ball in the battle between account management and creative arts - each of them wanted to be the originator of the big and clever ideas. (This is pretty widespread in the industry, and was even a recurring theme in "Mad Men.")

The takeaway here is, people like to be creative. People need to be creative. There will always be an implacable drive to create, one which DALL-E can never satisfy. Gen AI is the artificial sweetener that might temporarily satisfy those cravings, but ultimately artists want to create something from nothing. There's some hope to be found in that, amid the tsunami of AI slop.

[chefandy]

Well I really hope that you were easily able to transition out of paste-up because it kind of blows me away how quickly that whole craft just got clobbered. Just like my uncle that specialized in atlas publishing-- luckily he was able to hang on long enough to retire.

I agree that people do want to be creative, and I don't think that people are going to let Gen AI supplant that for them. However, the lower-end of the creative markets doing the low-end high-volume work-- think folks shotgunning out template-based logos on Fiverr-- are the ones that have already been displaced in large numbers, and there are far more of them. While they generally don't have the right skillset to do the higher-end work, their seeing that as the only viable career move is majorly fucking up companies' ability to find workers and vice versa, and for employers that don't know any better, they think the market is saturated which is bringing down wages.

Also, clueless executives just don't realize that having a neural network generate a "80% right" version of your work in a flat PNG file will take more effort to mold into shape for higher-end work than starting from scratch, so they've been making big cuts. A coworker on a contract also works in an animation house that fired their entire concept art department and replaced them with prompt monkeys making half as much money-- the problem was that standard art director changes-- e.g. I want this same exact image and garment, just make those lapels look a little fuller and softer but with sharper angles at the end, and change the piping on that jacket from green to purple-- might have been half an afternoon for a professional concept artist but would be DAYS of work to get art-director right using neural network tools... if for no other reason that the prompt writers just don't have the traditional visual art sophistication to even realize when they've got an appropriate solution, because learning that is a lot harder than learning to draw, and you learn that when you learn how to draw. So all the time they saved on the initial illustration was totally sucked up by art directors not being able to iterate even a tenth as quickly as they used to, and fast iteration was the major selling point for Gen AI to begin with. It simply does not do the task if you absolutely require specificity, and having a raster non-layered png that looks like it already went through post is a beast to edit, even for a skilled post-prod person. Well, three months later, they canned the prompt engineers and were begging their concept artists to come back and work for them again. What a waste of everything.

Why do I even bother torturing myself in forums like this by giving a real-world creative industry counterpoint to the tech crowd perspective, despite many of the most vocal ones being smug, patronizing, and self-aggrandizing? Maybe one executive out there will read this stuff and say "Hmm... maybe I should actually talk to people that work in this field that I trust to see if it's really beneficial to replace our [insert creative department] rather than relying on software execs and their marketing people say is feasible."

[schmidtleonard]

> "AI generated" I just instantly find it un-interesting artistically

How familiar are you with what is possible and how much human effort goes towards achieving it?

https://civitai.com/images

Photography, digital painting, 3D rendering -- these all went through a phase of being panned as "not real art" before they were accepted, but they were all eventually accepted and they all turned out to have their own type of merit. It will be the same for AI tools.

[beezlebroxxxxxx]

I'll be blunt, all of those images look comically generic and extremely "AI".

> Photography, digital painting, 3D rendering

Those are not the same as AI. Using AI is akin to standing beside a great pianist and whispering into his ear that you want "something sad and slow" and then waiting for him to play your request. You might continue to give him prompts but you're just doing that. In time, you might be called a "collaborator" but your involvement begins at bare minimum and you have to justify that you're more involved --- the pianist doesn't, the pianist is making the music.

You could record the song and do more to the recording, or improv along with your own instrument. But just taking the raw output again and again is simply getting a response to your prompt again and again.

The prompt themselves are actually more artistic as they venture into surrealist poetry and prose, but the images are almost always much less interesting artistically than the prompts would suggest.

[schmidtleonard]

> I'll be blunt, all of those images look comically generic and extremely "AI".

Ok, now I know you're watching through hate goggles. Fortunately, not everyone will bring those to the party.

> Using AI is akin... [goes on to describe a clueless iterative prompting process that wouldn't get within a mile of the front page]

You've really outed yourself here. If you think it's all just iterative prompting, you are about 3 years behind the tools and workflows that allow the level of quality and consistency you see in the best AI work.

[blargey]

I scrolled through and...have to agree with their impression. I'm confused as to what you thought is being demonstrated by images on https://civitai.com/images of all things, since it's all very high-concept/low-intentionality, to put it nicely. Did you mix it up with a different link?

[Nadya]

My litmus test is to simply lie. It weeds out the people hating AI simply because they know or think it is AI. If you link directly to an AI site they're already going to say they hate it or that it all "looks like AI slop". You won't get anywhere trying to meet them at a middle ground because they simply aren't interested in any kind of a middle ground.

> https://www.reddit.com/r/greentext/comments/zq91wm/anons_dis...

Which is exactly the opposite of what the artists claim to want. But god is it hilarious following the anti-AI artists on Twitter who end up having to apologize for liking an AI-generated artwork pretty much as a daily occurrence. I just grab my popcorn and enjoy the show.

Every passing day the technologies making all of this possible get a little bit better and every single day continues to be the worst it will ever be. They'll point to today's imperfections or flaws as evidence of something being AI-generated and those imperfections will be trained out with fine tuning or LoRA models until there is no longer any way to tell.

E: A lot of them also don't realize that besides text-to-image there is image-to-image for more control over composition as well as ControlNet for controlling poses. More LoRA models than you can imagine for controlling the style. Their imagination is limited to strictly text-to-image prompts with no human input afterwards.

AI is a tool not much different than Photoshop was back when "digital artists aren't real artists" was the argument. And in case anyone has forgotten: "You can't Ctrl+Z real art".

Ask any fractal artists the names they were called for "adjusting a few settings" in Apophysis.

E2:

We need more tests such as this. The vast majority of people can't identify AI nearly as well as they think they can identify AI - even people familiar with AI who "know what to look for".

https://www.tidio.com/blog/ai-test/

Artworks (3/4) | Photos (6/7) | Texts (3/4) | Memes (2/2)

Fun excerpt by the way:

> Respondents who felt confident about their answers had worse results than those who weren’t so sure

> Survey respondents who believed they answered most questions correctly had worse results than those with doubts. Over 78% of respondents who thought their score is very likely to be high got less than half of the answers right. In comparison, those who were most pessimistic did significantly better, with the majority of them scoring above the average.

[hyperG]

"Rap isn't even music, they aren't even singing!"

You are just expressing the same, uncreative, ignorant opinion that is always expressed when we come upon a NEW ART FORM.

[consteval]

I would say the difference here is with these:

> Photography, digital painting, 3D rendering

You still make these. You sit down and form the art.

When you use AI you don't make anything, you ask someone else to make it, i.e. you've commissioned it. It doesn't really matter if I sit down for a portrait and describe in excruciating detail what I want, I'm still not a painter.

It doesn't even matter, in my eyes, how good or how shit the art is. It can be the best art ever, but the only reason art, as a whole, has value is because of the human aspect.

Picasso famously said he spent his childhood learning how to paint professionally, and then spent the rest of his life learning how to paint like a child. And I think that really encapsulates the meaning of art. It's not so much about the end product, it's about the author's intention to get there. Anybody can paint like a child, very few have the inclination and inspiration to think of that.

You can see this a lot in contemporary art. People say it looks really easy. Sure, it looks easy now, because you've already seen it and didn't come up with it. The coming up with it part is the art, not the thing.

[danielbln]

When I make 3D art I instruct a lot of things, how the renderer is configured, lighting details, various systems that need to be tweaked to get the final render to look good.

Using the AI tool chains, you'd start with some generation either via text or image input, then modify various settingas, model, render steps, sampler, loras, then a generative upscaling pass, control nets to extract and apply depth, pose, outlines all etc. A colourful mix of systems and config, not unlike working 3D tool chains.

Its also not unusual to mix and match, handcrafted geometry but projection mapped generated textures and then a final pass in Photoshop or what have you.

Typing "awesome art piece" into ChatGPT is like rendering a donut.

[schmidtleonard]

> You still make these. You sit down and form the art.

When you use a camera you don't make anything. You press a button and the camera makes it. You haven't even described it.

When you use photoshop you don't make anything. You press buttons and the software just draws the pixels for you. It doesn't make you a painter.

When you use 3D rendering software you don't make anything. You tell the computer about the scene and the computer makes it. You've barely commissioned it.

It's easy to be super reductive. Easy but wrong.

[consteval]

Sorry, I don't think it's the same because making physical specifications via modifying pixels, or 3D art, or forming a shot is something you do.

It's the difference between making a house with wood and making a house by telling someone to make a house. One is making a house, one isn't.

The problem with AI is that it's natural language. So there's no skill there, you're describing something, you're commissioning it. When I do photoshop, I'm not describing anything, I'm modifying pixels. When I do 3D modeling, I'm not describing anything, I'm doing modeling.

You can say that those more formal specifications is the same as a description. But it's not. Because then why aren't the business folks programmers? Why aren't the people who come up with the requirements software engineers? Why are YOU the engineer and not them?

Because you made it formally, they just described it. So you're the engineer, they're the business analysts.

Also, as a side note, it's not at all reductive to say people who use AI just describe what they want. That is literally, actually, what they do. There's no more secret sauce than that - that is where the process begins and ends. If that makes it seem really uninspired then that's a clue, not an indicator that my reasoning is broken.

You can get into prompt engineering and whatever, I don't care. You can be a prompt engineer then, but not an artist. To me it seems plainly obvious nobody has any trouble applying this to everyone else, but suddenly when it's AI it's like everyone's prior human experience evaporates and they're saying novel things.

[aenvoker]

Try it sometime. Don't just type one prompt and declare the job done. Try to make something that invokes a reaction in yourself.

AI makes it easy to generate ten thousand random images. Making something of interest still requires a lot of digging in the tools and in your self.

[consteval]

Right, it can require describing and refining over and over. I still don't think that means you did the thing. Otherwise, the business analysts who have to constantly describe requirements would be software engineers, but they're not.

Not that that isn't a skill in it of itself. I just don't think it's a creationary skill. What you're creating is the description, not the product.

[jsheard]

If I were trying to convince people that AI art is interesting and creative then I would not choose to highlight the site dedicated to strip-mining the creativity of non-AI artists, to produce models which regurgitate their ideas ad infinitum.

[spookie]

Not to mention extremely suspicious checkpoints that produce imagery of extremely young women. Or in others words women with extremely child like features in ways kids should not be presented.

[TranquilMarmot]

Sorry, but there's nothing interesting or unique about the images on that site.

[vouaobrasil]

I think the main point is that art is interesting precisely because it can transmit human experience. It's communication from another human being. AI "media" completely lacks that. It's more of an expression of the machine-soul, which is tempting us to continue its development until it takes over.

[polishdude20]

For me, art is more interesting, moving, soul connecting the more it is made by less and less people. Art by one person gives me a unique perspective to the artists mind. AI generated art is the opposite of being created by one person. It's an amalgamation of millions or billions of people's input. To me that's uninteresting, not novel and not mind-expanding at all.

[xanderlewis]

> I only really hear about people being ecstatic about AI online, by people who are, for lack of a better term, really online, and who do not have the skills, know-how, or ability, to make art themselves.

Well put. This is also my experience. And I'm no AI doom-monger or neo-Luddite.

[aliasxneo]

I think a key piece here is that I often consume art from the mindset of, "What was the creator thinking?" What is their worldview? What social situations pushed them to express things in this way?

For video, it's possible AI can feed into the overall creative pipeline, but I don't see it replacing the human touch. If anything, it opens up the industry to less-technical people who can spend more time focusing on the human touch. Even if the next big film has AI generation in it, if it came from someone with a fascinating story and creative insight, I'll still likely appreciate it.

[wraptile]

I feel the opposite. I don't care how the sausage was made as long as it's a good sausage. Art was never about the creation process. In fact, before the internet most would never see the process at all. Just go to your local museum and you'll never know how most of pieces were made and that's a good thing. Art is all about the effect on the viewer.

[nessbot]

This requires such a shallow definition for the word "art." I think you're more just talking about images. Art is about more, including the process.

[wraptile]

Nah, meta-art is not that interesting tbh and the meta art culture is quite shallow in itself. Real art has always been about sharing an experience or an idea with the viewer and the production is completely irrelevant for this.

In other words if I take an AI drawing and lie the end user would still have the same experience as if I was telling the truth. My lie would only affect the meta culture not the art piece or viewers experience.

[Auracle]

> I only really hear about people being ecstatic about AI online, by people who are, for lack of a better term, really online, and who do not have the skills, know-how, or ability, to make art themselves.

I generate a lot of art using Stable Diffusion/Flux of my spouse, kids, friends, etc. I was a professional photographer for nearly 10 years - I quit just last year.

[nitwit005]

People find even randomly generated stuff artistic. I remember the San Francisco Chronicle review of an art piece, which was random cracks in rock caused by heating.

I sort of wondered how you could claim to be the creator of the art when your kiln did all the work, but I suppose they did the important labor of putting it in there.