[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.

[ipaddr]

You are creating the product but have to go through an unclear layer and through trial and error you try to reach your original vision. No different from painting a picture for an amateur.

The better you get the closer you can get to your original vision.

[aenvoker]

Best reply I can give ya I already typed up for someone else here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41743680